Poems
|
The Snow
the snow lies across the night
through the black branched trees
we see it
from the roadside as we pass
as we wind on our accustomed way
we see the snow still glowing light
within the dark ....
[Note: The Snow is included in my new collection Labyrinth
but is titled Nothing To Be Done About It]
the snow lies across the night
through the black branched trees
we see it
from the roadside as we pass
as we wind on our accustomed way
we see the snow still glowing light
within the dark ....
[Note: The Snow is included in my new collection Labyrinth
but is titled Nothing To Be Done About It]
Blake
What bravery, what extremes, completely
to leave the world and etch the real one
engrave it, ink with rainbow, then copy--
world everlasting, repeatable, done;
and listen only to voices inside
not the outside, political rabble’s
rush to the bottom financial scrabble,
take dictation, write songs and hymns, abide
the time when valleys’ green can meet again
inside our hearts that realm whose pure exchange
does not pollute; single-handed counter-
balance, counter-culture, who was madder--
poet of fire, brimstone, smoke stacks, vision
of sadness, small cold rooms’ introversion.
What bravery, what extremes, completely
to leave the world and etch the real one
engrave it, ink with rainbow, then copy--
world everlasting, repeatable, done;
and listen only to voices inside
not the outside, political rabble’s
rush to the bottom financial scrabble,
take dictation, write songs and hymns, abide
the time when valleys’ green can meet again
inside our hearts that realm whose pure exchange
does not pollute; single-handed counter-
balance, counter-culture, who was madder--
poet of fire, brimstone, smoke stacks, vision
of sadness, small cold rooms’ introversion.
The Cotton Wood Trees
Slow snow from the cottonwood trees at the dog-
leg to the lights, a glance shows two or is it three
trunks grouped along the roadside bank, their seeds
in slow rotation as if reluctant
uncertain in this thick heat, marking out
in that brief pause aslant the junction,
a canopy of remoteness, the weight
of distances - those older, taller trees
of long ago, gate-posts atop the grit-
dirt avenue leading to our heart-locked
Shangrila. The irrigation canal’s
banked concrete to the west, to the sunrise
the mountains’ curve of rimrock, where further
down the valley a white-facetted dome
sits on a green mound. Snowing in the dry
heat, listening to lives led so deep inland,
so far from anywhere familiar,
the breeze shimmers clusters of the leaves,
seeds slanting in a sideways shower, light
and shadow layer inside and around
me as I drive on further into town,
settled 1623, softening
at the river’s turn the gaunt brick mill -
now apartments where the rents are rising,
business premises to let - sifting
what matters, what is loved, here, always, what
it means to found a new world is to love.
Labyrinth
1.
a labyrinth is an indented swerve inwards
and out, a leaf skeleton, carving, pale x-ray
of ribbed lungs, curving path around one hemisphere
and through the mirroring other which is not, like
our reflection although backwards almost the same,
because, for one thing, it can be a different
scale: a wild west, a wilderness, a new England
that takes what the other was and runs it around
a different way:
the hallmark of manor house stamped across landscape,
psyche, English Lit., mimicked in clapboard and parsed
out across the frost hard, stone hard first land becomes
along the lonely long frontier, space - for red canyons,
monumental valleys, and mistakes: feeder roads
to strip malls, sign forests, glass acreage for let,
rows of empty homes.
The full shape is not in the view though, not even
well represented in miniatures and smaller
tokens of itself - you must get up high and fast
to see the serpent coiled on the mound, understand
why the one does not open to the other’s key.
Crossing over and back and finding the balance
or just stepping out again is a freedom so
light it needs no marking, so profound, its trophy
can only be awarded me myself, worn like
a piece of artisan jewelry, bought by myself
for me, hanging in the center through the window
of the thymus, glowing like a rainbow bridging
gold, the one world turning back into the other.
2.
Cut into rough green turf,
remembered with stone dust,
weeding, the pilgrims turn
and wind the grooved pathways
like glockenspiel
laid down in the underworld
of myth, hidden ground plan
of a citadel we still puzzle through
following its thread into and back
and then
because the reflection
flies faster than thought -
back again
out of the silence of sight
each pixel of infinity
sent for cataloguing on the left
to feed back to the right
the map we need to manage
the panoramic sweep of what
we are, of what beauty sleeps,
of leaves shaking out green light,
of the glittering advance of motorways
at night, or rivers of faces
along the streets,
of pathways that empty into
the birthing crack of stars,
dark matter, something
out of all reference
and sight, the next
turn of synthesis,
our new perceptions
rising in the spiral
around the tor.
3.
When you walk out early on a summer morning
and the world is simple as the blue sky
you never know where it is leading,
how you are making up a trail
coming to the center was leaving,
seeing what was left behind, grieving,
a stumble forwards into forests that were
similar but different, stripped of certainty,
painfully aware now a pattern had formed,
was it the right one or was I lost?
Attended by golden rod and fleets of dragon
flies, the gas line cut straight between the trees,
the trails, tentatively worn and marked,
snaked off from its sunlight into the woods,
moved up and around smooth granite boulder
lumps dumped there by the glacier, switched
back, morphed into bike tracks not on the map
without the mountain bikers we might
be there still - though never far from the
small, well-mannered New England town -
we were lost in the tricksy switch ways
of the magic forest, where paths turned
back gave views out into sudden spaces,
wound on round other mounds and passes -
in a way it was a relief, to have this
odd depth suddenly back, the literal
carefulness of notices, safety rules,
picnic tables, guard rails, kicked over
and forgotten in a sudden lapse.
4.
The town of Bath, Maine, proud home to the Bath
Iron Ship Works, their rusty edge under-
girding the harbour high street’s grand
miniature rounded town hall, reasonably
august antiques and half a dozen stores
of home things, glass birds, candles, kitchen bowls
agreed a remarkable scheme, opened
a trail that linked the brisk but cosy
crossed streets with the farthest flung out local
tip of wildness overlooking Whiskeag
Creek, haunt of eagles, yet also serving
as the public works and landfill, quite close
by to a cemetery. And so if
you want to you can walk around the whole
town’s archaeology
past the slightly set back YMCA,
down a scraggy lane at the side of the
Veterans Center its smoky bar blinking
in the daylight, by sports fields, a school,
another cemetery, then off through
mud, moss, granite slabs, broad glimpses
of quiet grey waters, more trees, more green
stretching across the state, and the next one
and on through frontiers and the vanishing
of America into wide empty
flat places where everything that might
once have been known or said is left
uttterly silent, changed, absorbed.
They linked land, buildings, zones, but they linked
the people too, made a circle, and a center -
and because of this I could fathom the depths
lost here since the Abenakis of the open wideness
where every slant of rain, and wrinkle of sheet water
spoke and instead of the unnamed swirling
emptiness that I had no words for
there was a language
that finally soothed with its lineaments
and my flow out to it all of love
which is always recognition
the hunger, the perplexed looking for
its shape patterned in us, irrevocably in us
expanding across the crossed ripples
the same proportions out into the farthest edges
of the everything fabric
smoothed into moments, story, silver water,
misted air
green
space itself which is both depth and width
and infinitely large and small
the way dimensions fold up in us,
unfold in new meaning
which is the meaning of
the labyrinth.
Finding Your Voice
Finding your voice
is not a matter so much
of lunging about
trying on this lavish
gesture, this fully-
prepared phrase,
but more a question
of settling down
growing still
enough
to make the secret
steadying link-up,
when the words are offered
like elegant gauntlets
that fit, something
subtle and fine enough
something that does
your self justice
Finding your voice
is not a matter so much
of lunging about
trying on this lavish
gesture, this fully-
prepared phrase,
but more a question
of settling down
growing still
enough
to make the secret
steadying link-up,
when the words are offered
like elegant gauntlets
that fit, something
subtle and fine enough
something that does
your self justice