Tag Archives: poetry

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)

10 Replies

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 (9)

16 Replies

from Spring Songs (9)

9.

The weather came from the east this time
as low as the sun in the west and the sun

And the weather crossed swords over young leaves
glowing green against gray. And the tulips held.

The gray face came down and looked into the street’s eyes
and this was the first of May.  Swallows follow a storm

like they have just won an argument with God
and the prize, so small we can’t see it, is everywhere.

from Spring Songs (8)

3 Replies

from Spring Songs (8)

8.

Nothing more can happen in April so I am waiting
The rain is waiting too clouds simmering in the south

The grass wants to touch you but looks away waiting
The buildings with their hands in their pockets

Gather quietly but keep a respectful distance
the afternoons light as if held up by balloons

The month has filled out the world so much its last
day will be empty it will need a day to decompress

The last hours gather around you like referees
watching an instant replay because nothing more

can happen: you have to compress the month
in your mind while the days decompress

so quickly that your memory leaps in slow motion
and the hours nod and blow their whistles

A string stretching across the stars and sky draws closer
a jump-rope in slow motion at the top of its arc

Just before you hear the sound of its rasp
on the sidewalk you must skip casually

into May your soul barely leaving the ground
because it is all so light now and you want to come back

from Spring Songs (4)

10 Replies

from Spring Songs (4)

4.

Mid-April moths insistent as saints.
A nest on the top of the maple

a sewn shape that withstood winter
by being empty. A hornet drops

from the blind to my windowsill.

from Spring Songs (3)

15 Replies

from Spring Songs (3)

3.

Spring’s caravan keeps coming, without effort
like a casual daydream of autumn

lightened by pollen colored lenses
settles everywhere until you cannot remove

your spring eyes and realize the daydream
was winter. The mountain takes

on color like it’s coming down with something.

from Spring Songs (2)

10 Replies

from Spring Songs (2)

2.

Each time I clear the fence of another day
I am trespassing onto the future’s yard

Like the deer behind the house
alarmed to find open space by the trees leaping

fence after fence and just as quickly gone

[4.14.15]

from Spring Songs (1)

9 Replies

from Spring Songs (1)

1.

Spring storms roam across the valley.
On the maple, leaves appear like gypsy tents.

Wind off the mountainside ruffles the green edges:
inside one of the leaves sits a woman at a fortune telling table

laying the lone card of summer face-down.

The Roots

5 Replies

The Roots

Under your house, in the middle of the night
the roots are spreading across your foundation.

The roots are not a solid base for the visible,
they have never claimed to be that, they have

never even spoken to you. What roots do
is reach out for available space, where roots reach

Is a place you cannot see but which you feel
pulled towards but you are not being pulled,

you are reaching further and further. Up above
your head in the unseen inside you are also reaching.

In the middle of the day the sky’s foundation
is laid again and you are reaching across it

without knowing because you are distracted
by an oak tree’s afterthought ankling out of the earth

And back in where the world is constantly displaced
by the unseen middle, unstraight path.