Poem to be read in the middle of the night (iii)

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Poem to be read in the middle of the night

dreamish

In the forest path dream where the light slashing through
leaves are words written too fast for me to read

And your spirit animal pauses, its white head shifting as if sniffing
the undergrowth and pulling the colors of the undergrowth into the air

I am the trunk of the blue tree, observing silently as you walk by,
grazed by your eyes like understanding is a wounding season

Still unaware the words in the air are poems I am writing
by the light that filters past me unabsorbed and I’m growing only

to be still, rooted deep at passage’s edge to the turning earth
beneath the whistling sun shuffling its days

 

-painting by Mary Winifred Hood Schwaner

Poem to be read in the middle of the night (ii)

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Poem to be read in the middle of the night

Crow shadow passes across the shrugging pine
In the dark a shadow cannot move

It is paralyzed even when the body moves
the shadow stays you cannot shake it

When light filters through the branches
the bird long gone the shadow will

hold still, as if it were never there

Poem to be read in the middle of the night (i)

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Poem to be read in the middle of the night

In the daylight the wind in high branches
can at least be seen if not heard

In the spring it will regain its voice
the trees will put on their hands and applaud

Their applause is what we hear
The performance itself slips through ungrasped

Sky to Star

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treeline

Sky to Star

How can you lose the sky
When you can look right through me

And see the gears of the earth
Building themselves to your motion

Down on the ground where it’s all
silent as time I weave the weeds

On the river of dirt
Into my invented life

But the least rooted stalk
Will have none of it and flows off

and the weeds see through me
They see you   they see you

January 1, 9:24 PM (Wolf Moon) [#fullmoonsocial]

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January 1, 9:24 PM (Wolf Moon) [#fullmoonsocial]

wolfmoon

In the wolf’s eye is the guile of the sun:
I turned my back on the sinking day

To find it’s still staring at me, placid
spurned communion wafer

Last Days

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Last Days

Told me to wait another two nights.
and the truth would rise like ice cubes

In a celebratory drink. Without taste
But accentuating the taste that’s there

Already, then adding volume to it
While weakening the taste but by then

It’s not the taste you’re after is it and where
Has it got to finally, absorbed, invisible?

The moon looks full but it’s not. Not that
It matters but it does. Like other things

That never happened but did anyway
And because they never happened never end

Dusk and Beyond

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Dusk and Beyond

 

The dusk sky is a gameboard of bats,
everyone’s lost apologies for what

They knew they did wrong but could not find
The words to admit. Homeless things.

The poet’s night shift has me emotional–
The moon’s pendulum scythe swings

Below the tree line and I wake up astonished
To be alive. The poem holds a word

To my throat and the word is your missing
touch. In the world are some animals whose feet

Never touch the ground. Birds who only
Land on the uncertainty of open water.

Just as in you there are poems
that may never land on the tree of language

But whose wingbeats keep you awake,
Whose migration over open space

Turns everyone’s heads though they hear
Only your voice on a quiet morning.

December 30

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December 30

 

All winter the days will grow– into winter’s death
Where light and darkness equal out.

Penultimately just nine days in it serves us
To pretend the end of anything–

So make your list. Sum it up
Like any cat lifting its tail to spray

Against the furniture. Already the leaves
Hiding like a punchline to a joke not yet told

Are laughing at how quickly the living forget
The cold, the weird verse of numbing wind

I hear in my mother’s painting of snow
And sunset, starlings on the highest branches

Of black walnut, as light as the best and worst
Of any year, as gone as the dead who won’t come back.

Ghost

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ghost driveway

Ghost

It comes back           in the framework of an ache
New to the knee           though you’ve had no injury
Stretching           and the gap closes instantly
Between confidence           and a death you’ve seen already

It’s not a ghost           which keeps you up at night
It’s certainty           any telltale pain appearing suddenly
The ghost is           your memory, incomplete, waiting
The last memory           that it comes back.

From the tribe of Asher

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luke

From the tribe of Asher

The necessary second witness. Pointing finger of a lost tribe
Finding its place again. Behold the blessed castaway.

Even her age meant a completion and a return.
How can we trust anything when every thing

Means something? Is every father the face of god
Until the glimpse of the infant visage, God the beginning?

Seven dozen years waiting against the stone of the dead.
Father stone, husband stone. Waiting as the days dry up

To make the math work wonders. What else did she see
In the intervening hours but a name in another tongue

the same backwards as forwards? I would believe you
Against all the world believes. I cast a pebble at the well

And the hand that caught it before it fell