Tag Archives: spring

Watching Starlings

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Watching Starlings (Watching Two Starlings High In A Black Walnut Tree in April)

Their balance, while temporary, seems eternally sure.
One rubs his beak on the sun-warmed bark

like a blade on a whetstone.
The other chooses from the roughly

ten thousand sounds starlings are capable
of making, emitting a two-tone whistle

which mimics the sound of the second
half of a life-changing question.

If not for the wind chime’s song I would not have known
what I wasn’t seeing, so still it all seemed.

Only by not watching starlings could I
acknowledge the entire tree was moving

with the flexibility the most exact feeling or
thought must have to survive year after year

as it branches out, spreading across open space.
Ask a starling what the difference is between feeling and thought

who, stopping for minutes, may seem like they will remain
as long as they need, completely still, utterly certain

in each feather that everything in fact is moving
at the speed of the first half of a life-changing answer

Spring Night Sounds

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Cars over a mile away on the interstate
like dust whispering.

Pots and dishes being put away
by someone with the kitchen window open.

The dishes want to make noises
that trees growing cannot make

that buds falling or sap forming
on the swelling peony bulbs

cannot make. We are here, they say,
though the seasons are beyond them.

We are still here.
We are here with you.

We are your voice.

Humpback Rocks, Early Spring

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Humpback Rocks, Early Spring

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So I took you up with me
to this chiseled place

where the clouds are closer
than their shadows

The whisper among the trees
a shout of bark and lichened rock

Mountainside trees stand differently
shaped by cascading arrangement

higher up where the wind is so loud
you no longer register it as sound

all I hear is the noise of trees bending
against each other, ajar to the invisible

like doors opening all around me

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March 29

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March 29 

 

It will hurt. The empty
pages of a lost book

you can never read again:
Now you know what it is

to write. To take a walk.
The boxwoods whisper

only the prurient details,
the red maples an advocacy

of lifting secrets suddenly
light as squirrels. Everything

that comes close to the light
scatters its shadow farther from

the shape of what we felt,
the dark fret where footprints

filigree the sorrowful soil
of another rich season.

Last Poem of Spring

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Last Poem of Spring

Boxing up books. It is almost summer.
So many different flowers are packed in

the small flower garden. Gin and tonic
in a jar with ice, as light leaks away.

There are the dead, the lost,
the memories floating in patterns

like fireflies, their season starting
with a wild inland storm, mountains

disappearing behind the gray wall

Inside Outside

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Inside Outside

In my son’s room at dusk a firefly floats to the ceiling
I know outside they are rising to the thick canopy

in the backyard where even the night barely gets through
When I walk out the fireflies are re-arranging the constellations

as if they are not sure what shapes to believe in
Here I am at fifty recognizing no shapes of belief but noticing

the vectors of illumination   There are crickets
in the high grass near the fence I haven’t had the heart

to cut back in this yard I will not see next spring

On the Source of the River

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On the Source of the River

On the mountain rain falls, snow melts.

The source of the river is the sky.
So it is that the source of love is not within reach

But flows over me and carves my every direction.
The source of the river is the spring. So it is

That I can never go back to the source of love
but it spends itself constantly on my behalf;

So it is that the very earth is between us
but the very earth gives a way to us in the shape

of a river. The source of the river is a bog.
Like energy, love has no direction. It can be hidden

as potential until the porous ground can hold
no more and it breaks into acceleration

embanked by our lives, carrying us beyond
ourselves towards a wider body evaporating into the sky

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.

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