Tag Archives: unregulated verse

Dog Days

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Dog Days

Nothing sturdy in the stem.
Nor of legacy in the one-season leaf.

All dogs must die, but not at once.
Like grass, let’s grow monuments

too numerous to be destroyed
in a single death. We’ll sit with this one

through the moments
we’ll not remember in a year

to remember we can build
what matters from pure light

recognize love same as we know
the texture of both sides

of this summer leaf waving
welcome and farewell

in the single breeze passing
from invisible past

to invisible future. All dogs
like summers will pass

but not before we live them
through. Let’s leap into

the coming stillness.
Let’s make the favorite meal.

Let’s sit with this one, no more
special than a blade of grass,

great as any dog or summer ever lost,
and let it last as long as it lasts

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Last Poem of Spring

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photo

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

Translational Velocity, Full Moon, Mid-Afternoon in Early June

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Translational Velocity, Full Moon, Mid-Afternoon in Early June

It is more than how quickly these lines reach you.
It is that they move you. How through them

You change position in time. I used to think love
was the measure of an object’s rotational inertia,

Well not exactly in those words, but how things
in a given state should stay in that state without end

But I was mistaken, that measure is simply mass
as it spins or doesn’t, assuming further it has a center

Around which to spin and absolutely nothing
that could make it wobble or twist. Your hands

And wrist gently, impossibly, your neck and jaw
set the stillness spinning, under the hidden moon

And the leaves with their riot of turning stems
in the slight breeze and the alternating paths

They allow the light to the pavement
beneath the sycamore limbs, as we stand still

Moving on the inside, or move over time, love is the change
In direction or speed, love is the inconsistent

liveliness, the moving picture, projected on any surface,
love is just keeping up with it, keeping up.

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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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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