Tag Archives: not haiku

Winter Sun

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Winter Sun

Sometimes it’s the other way around,
though most times the winter sun does x off x

by which I mean, you glimpse it baring the soul
of a whisper of empty branches or scrolling a message

across exhausted snow crusting a street corner
and you see reality, suddenly, not in a new way but an old

way in the way the winter sun is old, it’s been burning
so long after all maybe you think not with the heat

it had as a younger sun when everything grew green
beneath its gaze till a hemisphere turned its shoulder one

season and that was it, but sometimes it’s the other way
around, things can be cold and burning at once,

sometimes reality sees you, and it’s blinding.

To the Poem I Did Not Write Last Night, & To Its Reader Who Will Not Read It But Will At Least Have This

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To the Poem I Did Not Write Last Night, & To Its Reader Who Will Not Read It But Will At Least Have This

A thousand years from now, the distance between last night
and tonight will be infinite. Unreachable, like the star

you pretend to hold at the end of the line I never wrote.
The last night of a waning moon is this night’s memory

cradling in its thin hand the entire darkness
of what we almost cannot see and so pretend

is not there even as what never happened
pulls us back like moonlight through winter trees.

Stay awake to watch. You have only twenty five thousand seconds
to read this before you wake up remembering that

I never wrote it, brimming with loss and a poem that
started with How does the waning moon still rise?

Warm Breeze, Mid-Afternoon in Mid-Winter

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Warm Breeze, Mid-Afternoon in Mid-Winter

At the walnut tree’s highest reach
the day’s breeze sets twigs and thin branches

tense like frantic lost messages, last waves goodbye
but the slur slows through the random knots

and twists of the limb structure and’s spread asunder
further in by the outward-reaching limbs and widening

resolve of main branches to the absolute breaking
of leftover negative space: down where I am, humming

a tune I heard my beloved sing and will not forget,
just my voice in the quiet, here at the trunk where all is still.

Winter Evening, After Much Snow

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Winter Evening, After Much Snow

Plows pound the shoreline of the storm.
When their wave has passed, the shovels

emerge like crabs and get busy. The full moon,
distant jellyfish, drifts over the becalmed buildings.

Nine Things That Happened In Dreaming and Waking Within Twenty Four Hours of the Last Day of My Fiftieth Year

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Nine Things That Happened In Dreaming and Waking Within Twenty Four Hours of the Last Day of My Fiftieth Year

I left everything in a hotel room on my way to another
An eight year old boy rode his new bike with no training wheels

On the street I caught a blue pouch thrown by a stranger
I knew by how it settled into my palm it was a string of rosary beads

A butterfly fighting the gentle morning breeze on the hill again
and again to land on a dead squirrel and feed

Two early fireflies high in the ash tree’s night canopy
where earlier in the day hundreds of white flowers

Floated down, tiny parachutes onto new grass
The moon sparking off a tin roof like a match

My wife lay her head on my chest to listen to my heart
as I awoke from a dream of laughing

from Spring Songs (12)

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from Spring Songs (12)

12.

Midnight. In a corner of a room
a few days away, a half century crouches.

In the dark the corners of the years round up
certainty into the smooth black mast

against which direction flaps without words,
a trunk removed from its roots.

In the morning it is the maple and its shadow
unwinding along riverways of air and light.

The maple is old but the leaves always young,
the hours of the year, the half million

minutes through which we extend and end,
define the canopy of entirety itself by the shape

of what we miss. We shed time but are shaped by it;
wine on a quiet night, before crickets.

springsong12_2

Dark Reactions

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Dark Reactions

In the night the unseen stretches out.
Grass growing just before dawn.

I think I see the moon in my window
but it is the ceiling lamp’s reflection.

At lights out, the windowframe relaxes.
We spread downhill, and into the air a giant

centimeter. The real moon shakes hands
with every cloud. Even without eyes it

does not miss a single one. When morning
light crawls down from the treetops

and you are out with the dogs the grass
cannot believe how much you have grown.

Nothing gets done by paying attention.

from Spring Songs (11)

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from Spring Songs (11)

11.

Upstairs in my old house I find a bat
sleeping off a warm May morning

I usher the cats from the room
open the windows and let him rest

Toward dusk I come back his eyes are open
so I gather him up in a pitcher and in slow

motion pour him into the cooling air

bat

from Spring Songs (10)

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from Spring Songs (10)

10.

No moon. God has no early evening plans.
Oak and walnut leaves spread across the neighborhood,

A planet whirs like a lime between the new leaves.
A bright spot. A memory. Gone in the morning.

If there really is a time to be still it is now: a cell
splits, reforms, comes whole, continues,

is cut out, spins like a leaf into a space
of no-being, hard matter. Alone on a bed

you will suffer the speed of being observed
as from afar while the world spins, they lean away,

your loved ones, into the dark, come round again.
In the mean time, when your light winks or is blocked

by the slightest breeze against a leaf, we will know
and run with you to keep you in sight, at the speed

of the day’s suffering itself to be tracked by shadows,
and together find the time to be still.