The Blue Fell

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The Blue Fell

The sky was catching its breath on the mountaintop
It had come a long way I suppose in a hurry its journey

Not yet done For whom do you carry these tears
Asked the fell For a son who has lost his father

The sky answered though this cloud has enough
Grief that some may fall on the car just now lost

In its fog The pines on the fell bristled and the under
Growth glistened with derision The fog said the fell

Is mine it arises from my circumstance in the lower
Green regrets it is too humble to creep over these

Heights and the fell broke the cloud and the cloud’s
Own dying half-crept east bleeding clear rain

and wind from the contours
Broke it further

And a man awoke from a dream of holding his
Mother who was crying but in the dream the tears

Were words in other languages because she had forgotten
Her own language six years ago the words rolling

Across the floor like marbles rolling incomprehensible
And outside his father younger by forty years

Was mowing the lawn shirtless he liked how the mower
Was so loud no one could call his name

Until he was done then I blinked halfway up the fell
Sleet clattering like marbles off the windshield

I took him up once at the top on a clear day
We stood there with nothing between us

And we went back down together

Six late-August evenings (4)

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Six late-August evenings (4)

4.
When I woke the hole inside my dream was being filled
By something blacker than the night-soil

For an hour I watched awake on my bed as if from underground
As if being awake were something buried in my dream

Observing the cross section of my spirit and I understood
Each root was a person whose spirit had grafted invisibly

And fed the visible and I knew with certainty
The hole being filled was where my father had been

What it was filled with I did not know I only knew
I had to wake but there was no additional waking

There was no news in the morning to carry that loss
So it seeped into me as if I were a hole recently dug

It could have been that morning it will be another
I have already lived it realizing what I think is real

Is another seed buried in a night of wild sounds
Another empty pod from which a dream has grown

Waking up again to the darkness in the dark filling
To the sound of absence pouring into the future

Six late-August evenings (3)

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Six late-August evenings (3)

3.
The mist climbs down the edges of the soccer field.
We are surrounded: on one side a power substation

With towers, cables and wires stretching out in all directions
Dwarfing the abandoned factory on Commerce with the smokestack

That looks like someone stubbed a giant cigar
Into the earth, back when people were giants;

On the other side a massive mostly empty school for the deaf
And blind trying to figure out what to become in

A new century where you don’t isolate children.

The mist is rolling, from the corners of the field
Toward the pre-teen daughters in their blue and red

Pinnies focused on the soccer scrimmage.
My daughter is out there, growing taller and stronger

And more invisible with each passing minute.
Coaches are like a good timepiece made in another

Country, they don’t stop for anything. Not even for
Parents whose daughters are disappearing before

Their eyes, straining to identify a joyful yell for the ball
As it skids over the wet blades into the future,

beyond the taut lines of current and the brooding brick
and the skeletal structures of power behind them, looming.

Six late-August evenings (2)

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Six late-August evenings (2)

late-august

2.
I heard the earth breathing through its lungs the trees.
Outside the beasts of habit prowled back and forth.

But we are all beasts on another’s street.
Inside, we are the small shadows of the trees,

Doing their opposite, breathing in what they exhale
As the earth breathes in our every word,

Translating each into half a hand of shade above us.
When dawn breaks, the sidewalk is empty.

A newspaper lays on its side by the butterfly bush,
Condensation misting words within the plastic bag,

The beasts of habit are nowhere to be seen
But the grass, wet and flattened as if from a struggle.

The headline says that the words
Had just fallen during the night

From the future

Six late-August evenings (1)

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Six late-August evenings (1)

1.
My sister whole of body and mind
Still a flower yet to be crushed

Lithe at twenty as a cat and with a cat’s deceiving
Focus sits re-spooling tape into a cassette

Clink of Heineken and scrub oak crickets
How we echo-locate the Cape Cod dark

And the invisible stairway to heaven slid down
As we forced the world to sing backwards with us

These Days (solar eclipse poem #1, with apologies to Ron Sexsmith)

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These Days (solar eclipse poem #1, with apologies to Ron Sexsmith)

suninbox

The hole in the sky nobody can look at–
The sun in the cereal box

Falling through folded foil.
Everything that revolved around me

Lay unmoving beneath the maple
–no! They are stirred by a leaf’s breath.

fallenmoons

August 21

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A great eclipse poem by C. Not ‘optional’ reading…

C's avatarOPTIONAL POETRY

A magnitude of difference
between true totality
and ninety-eight percent.

Even so, and for only ninety-three,
we rushed out after rounds
and off the floors

and gathered on the roof
in scrubs and scrub hats
or business casual

sharing cheap glasses
and cardboard viewers
and temporarily forgetting

the code just moments earlier—
occluded vessels, and open chest.
I didn’t hear them call it,

had stared from the corridor
at the vacant face, unsure,
but only briefly.

Some artist said art is an action
against, a denial of death.
Exquisite contrast here:

a light goes out permanently–
no fractions, shades, or nuance.
Minutes before totality

our shadows turned sinuous,
like warped x-rays,
long and lithe and wrong.

Filtered through the trees,
a thousand shadow-crescents,
cast by the pinhole spaces

between the leaves,
too small to see directly.
Even seven percent of sun

was bright as day—
someone from HR said
it…

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Pre-eclipse artifacts

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DARK

Pre-eclipse artifacts

I pause the horror movie to go to bed.
The gray tree frogs rolling dice in the dark.

Night enters the room, but without
stars, crickets, wind in the walnut trees,

all stuck to the window screen’s other side.
And for three days sleep would also

not come in. It stayed out there, hovering

moth, opportunity missed like a perseid.
Without that thing I have no memory of

I could barely remember myself. I blamed
my stress, my sins, my age. Blamed the photo

of the bodies floating behind the car
like points in a constellation for fear,

already so far beyond gravity.

But there is always something more
frightening than what you fear most.

Tomorrow the monster we killed as children
will have to be killed again. Without my eyeglasses,

in an hour where weapons of any kind are scarce,
the five toothbrushes on my bathroom sink

shone in the dark and brought me back.

the things we carry

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If you’re not a regular visit to Leonard’s site, you might want to check it out. His posts of poems by Tang and Sung dynasty Chinese poets started me down a very important path as a reader and a writer. His own work, such as the poem here, are wonderfully evolved mechanisms of concision that you don’t even realize have gotten into your head until suddenly a thought of your own blooms, seemingly out of nowhere, and you realize it grew from one of his poems. This poem is a great example of that. You will remember this, hours or days or years from now.

zdunno03's avatarLeonard Durso

the things we carry
are the things
that won’t let go

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