Mid-November, Daybreak
Mountains bow low when the day stands up.
Immediately the sun is at our house
preparing to knock – the maple spreads its arms.
Later, we wake among stilled stars and golden silence.
Mid-November, Daybreak
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Category Archives: The Drift
Ash Leaf
Ash Leaf
Watching the moon
through a hole
in an ash leaf
*
What a caterpillar
didn’t eat frames a
thousand years
*
This poem is a leaf
where what’s missing
reveals the other side and
what’s left behind is
bound to fall
Mid-Autumn Figures (Moon and Maple)
Mid-Autumn Figures (Moon and Maple)
Moon
Stone in the sky
tumbles through centuries
of clouds smoothing out
absence with its presence
Maple
Just past their peak, wind-lifted
and let go like a child flung off a swing
higher than they have ever been
Meanwhile on the ridge line the trees
link arms and begin the walk home
Unfinished Dedication
Unfinished Dedication
Now that it is done I should know who I am
and why I did it and who I did it for now
that it is arrived the end should be a secret
passage back to the beginning and this
unfinished space a private garden at world’s
end and the buried seeds break anew now that
destruction’s heat has called them open and when
things begin that are unexpected we should have
expected them back here at the beginning knowing
everything that follows but because nothing
follows the end I should know I’m not there now
that it is done and where are you now that
It is done you should know who you are
November Mountain Scene
November Mountain Scene
Deer have ventured out through thinning trees
into thickening traffic. Men in trucks gentle them
to the breakdown lane with shovels. The last leaf’s
twisting stem is the voice of the deer in November.
Moonprint
Moonprint
With a moon not yet full behind a sky not yet clear
a glowing handprint floats over the house
holds emptiness like a drifting welcome
closed to nothing always open to you
The Stones
The Stones
Winter begins in the stones. In a dream the sky house
gets closer as if it is trying to hear a secret or tell me one
but when I can read its lips I see it is just pretending.
In the car: stones from a trip to the beach.
A thousand miles from where we found them
for months they have rested in a drink holder
with no discernible nature acting on them,
no car tides or car gulls have hampered their stillness.
Now when we pick them up on a drive we marvel
at how cold they are on this mild first day of November.
You can press them to your hand, your neck, your cheek
and they stay cold. They are telling me a secret
without moving their lips or pretending to tell me anything.
They are coming closer without moving, like snow clouds.
Wind Intervals
Wind Intervals
In a space under trees I can hear the wind that is not here
like a can kicked across the street by a boy still coming
or as if the act of the boy shaping his mouth to shout
made a sound before the sound of the shout
What is the word that I hear before the trees
above me shake and give the wind a momentary word
What is the sound of a loosening of leaves
like forgetting hands just before they drop
to our sides? The interval of apprehension.
The time we are alive. The boy stepping up the curb.
The Sound
The Sound
Today the sound of rain is over my head, in the leaves.
For a month it will get more and more silent
As the canopy thins, even as each drop more directly
hits its mark it will be more and more like a whisper
of something going away, until the level of leaf is ground
and then in the first cold rain a new sound like a cough
rattling to life instead of death, louder and colder will
arise from the earth, for a few times anyway reminding
us that nothing not even death stops talking until the
first snowflake tells it utterly and quietly to shut up.
Psalm
Psalm
So where is the past? Is it the terrain
in periphery, never the destination
but whose contours shape the weather?
Is it the icy light the moon reflects
on the tracks of things before me?
Wonderful deeds have we done, and
fearful things. They lay across the path
of parting like roots or over-hang
my steps with shade and snakes.
I do not wish to look
back. I only need to know
from which direction will come
the monster-god it has nurtured
to replace me so that I may stand
before him in the breach to turn away
his wrath, convince this pale reflection
that it could be a kinder god
Translations from the English 