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Stranded on the Shore

After the first spring rain, debris
is lifted off the recently
thawed riverbanks and slips downstream,
threading its course within the seam
of current passing out to sea.
I watch the waste of last year flash
before the fishing pier, the trash
from summer outings and the limbs
and branches stripped by storms, felled whims
from autumn gone without a splash.
A bottle bobs and circles by,
still capped. I can identify
nothing of note ensnared inside.
Still I trust it makes the tide.

Fee Simple

A grappler works on Easter Sunday lifting
logs onto flatbed trucks. The hill is clear
cut. Views of the valley will be going up
for sale. A garrison should commandeer
at least a half-a-million, real estate
being about surroundings first and last.
And this viewpoint is almost made to order;
nothing interrupts an unsurpassed
perspective: river vanishing between shorelines
still wooded. There's objections to this plan
to build a great development on what
was forest once. That appears Utopian.
I'm sure the same was raised when grounds we live
on now were found to be acquisitive.

Eagle Business Consulting Services

An eagle doesn’t drive to work on wings
before it’s had its cup of coffee, dark,
no sugar, with a rainbow trout to go.
An eagle never goes anyplace on a lark,
morning commutes included. Eagles are
notoriously single-minded and even
phone their clients from their cars in traffic
leaving every moment unbereaven.
At work an eagle plunges into its job
feet first seizing the day with its razor-sharp
talons and a thirst for drawing first blood.
Eagles are eagle-eyed. They’ll catch a carp
in the muddiest accounting schemes each time.
They are indeed the newest paradigm.

Almost a Love Sonnet

Over the water, an eagle floats
along the currents of the wind
with all the presence of a man
in love. Its flight is disciplined
by clouds alone.
                                     By following
the curve of river, it found itself
direction, sailing to verdant seas
that sow the continental shelf,
and settled in an evergreen
to wait for sustenance, or sounds
made by some passion trespassing.
When either happens, it surrounds
the air around itself with wings
embracing all the lift it brings.

Clairvoyancing July 20, 1963

The highly wrought baroque curves of the Bentwood
oscillate in balanced, almost seasonal,
geometry as Aunt Samara sways
beneath the darkening the coronal
eclipse is covering the earth in, lit
by just that circular indefinite

aurora formed around the lunar specter
come aground. And then Samara stops.
Startled by this unexpected pause
I turn from my science pursuits; the filter drops.
I watch Samara put her hand to her mouth
and look to something she espies in the south.

Whooping like the Indians I’d seen
on Saturday exclusive matinee
performances of westerns filmed in black
and white with Randolph Scott or Joel McCrea,
she recognizes her native spirit guide
coming through the colorless countryside.

I’m six years old and see nobody there
but she starts talking in an altered tone
of voice to what is only air to me,
yet something eerie says we’re not alone,
or that’s the notion I remember now
recalling facts doubt doesn’t disallow.

Of revelations I can only guess
but I’m the only one alive who can.
My mother, looking from behind the screen
door of our kitchen, slammed it shut and ran
to shelter in her living room and wait
until Samara found her routine state

of consciousness returned to its creation—
where only I could tell her what transpired.
She recollected nothing of her visitor
or any divination she acquired,
except the message she had left with me
before she left her principality

beneath a totally divergent sun.
But there are days I wonder if there’s more
to what I heard than gibberish amiss—
indigenous, an interlocutor
between the decade and its coming sin,
four months before they slayed its paladin:

“After Dallas tolls the Tonkin Gulf,
resolved to multiply its Nam by blood
in country, while prime cities divide within
proof negatives of X and King, the flood
incites an acid course via LA
then My Lai, bringing to light its auto-da-fe.”

Or maybe it was understated, more
discreet: “Their providence is wearing thin.
That threadbare baritone no longer reaches
notes of distinction but sinks its grin
beneath peninsulas of grimaces.
The lone ambassador exhumes Cortez.”

Or enigmatic: “Memory and reeds
whisper paradoxical canoes
innately in dark streams of consciousness.
Centurions with ringside seating cruise
calamities and teardrops. Dragonflies
answer the falconer while right whales rise.”

But that’s not what Samara said it had said
when, as the sun returned from shadow play
she turned her spirited eyes to me, her face
a guise whose wrinkles had disappeared as day
had disappeared from light of afternoon,
as she had ceased her swaying just as soon

scaring the daylight from my mother’s eyes.
Samara looked at me as if I were
a silhouette of some slight waterspout
effusive still after the temperature
had plummeted below the freezing point,
some living afterthought she could anoint

with holy chrism oil. “Tell Samara
her husband speaks to me in Manitou.
And tell Samara that Nathaniel leaves
her flowers, their yellow petals yet unfurled—
behind the garden shed, beneath the cedar.
He waits until that time when time has freed her.”

And then Samara started rocking back
and forth again, her past expression one
again with the current reappearancing
of a normal afternoon phenomenon—
without a ghost of cloud perceptible
within the heavens—indivisible

from space and time or other scientific
certainties the new frontier unearthed.
I never said a word about the limits
she had crossed, or suspicion she had birthed
in my developing terrain of trust
and disbelief, that world of steel and rust

that drives me to this day. She never revealed
her expeditions either. And when she died
a few years later I remembered not
a thing about her time revivified
in spirit except to think it far out, weird
that daffodils had suddenly appeared

from out of nowhere in Samara's yard.
But more important things were beckoning
—the revolutions of desire incarnate—
than that pretty plot of reckoning.
The summer of love looked to offer more
than adoration from some distant shore.


THE END

The Phantoms of Monadnock

Around Monadnock
Saturday the sun
dissolved in light
snow showers while its ridges
slipped away akin
to native nations
before the white
assault. That sacrilegious
triumph wasn’t one
that worried away
the spirit might
in ruin and disarray.

Some wafted in the air
as prophets warning
dwellers of their past—
it’s not quite clear
as planimetric maps
have drawn it out
to be. The boundaries
between the here
and then are thinner
than the rich and famous,
but surer than cool
mists of Nostradamus.

Where the Deer and Coyote Play

That the wildlife refuge on Plum Island
is not a sanctuary from concerns
of business, home, or everything pop culture,
but topography for being wild—

as shorebirds, songbirds, hawks, coyote, deer,
and that occasional photographer
or poet—is not a thing that every creature
sees. For instance, birders look for Iceland

Gulls, Tri-colored Herons, or Virginia
Rails, and almost never know the land
itself, that wilderness of marshes, dunes,
and start to infinite Atlantic seas.

But Barbara does. And so today she slogs
along that filament of beach, her camera
at hand, apprehending an indistinct
ocean, a muted blue advance nearby

arising from unknown cerulean
horizons. The tide is new moon full and soon
the shore is nothing more than walls of dunes.
The sand is unsettled and steep, and walking is

intractable for one beyond her prime.
Her breathing plumbs untold depths; she steps unsure.
The only place to walk is now the wash
of surf; the tide’s grown astronomical.

The beach all but vanished, she dreams of sleep
amid some breach in the dunes (despite awareness
that a storm is streaming from the west
venting extremes of weather towards this coast).

But then she chances on a stranger reflecting
on driftwood, leaping at suggestions from
the sea. She pauses, then grows motionless;
he pushes her with animated speech.

She stares intently at him yet doesn’t speak;
he’s bewildered by water at her feet.
Her face is weathered from something more than wind;
he wonders why she’s calling on the wild?

Addressing her unswerving silence, he
detects disorientation and disquiet,
a deer that’s caught in circumstances starker
than the existential light of day.

He asks if she's alright; she gestures no.
Arising from his seat of driftwood, he leads
her to a place to rest; it resurrects
her worn down heart. Then she recounts her tale...

He counters there's a way out to the road
just down the beach a little. She must have passed
the spot before she reached these driftwood shores.
She sighs and asks if he would walk her back

and drive her to her car. And so he does.
She says he saved her life. He doesn’t hint
at who he is, but says he’s playing hooky
from work. In truth, the island called him there

he’s now aware. He meant to dance in the sun
but island gods had other work for him to do.
Because she loves Plum Island for its wildness
and not as means for gawking at wildlife living

and dying, it unearthed this way to send her home.
And as she drives the refuge road again,
she witnesses this vision on marsh ice:
Coyote leaping in his paradise.

Jules Chauvin, Ferryman in Exile

In the dead of winter Calvin mends
his craft while waiting for the ice to crack
from January’s cold. Outside he hears
the whisper of a sleigh, or was it wind?

No matter, no one wants a ferry boat
tonight. He'd like a pint of whiskey though,
Canadian would sure be nice, remind
him of the life back home—Trois Rivieres.

There, they're living like they did in June,
all with sub-zero zest. But here he stays
at home refurbishing his block and tackle,
too many lengths of rope, and threadbare wear.

Canoes were more straightforward. Even traps
demanded less confinement than this river
living. But separation makes the heart
forget its suffering, its loss of blood

and country. Now the evergreens are braced
with oak. And now that whispering is knocking
on his door as if the northwest wind
returns to lay his secret on this land.

“Who’s there?” he asks the night. Another knock.
“The ferry doesn’t run past autumn. Off!”
Another knock, but this time louder than
the god of winter’s awful cataclysm,

or that’s what Calvin mutters to himself
rising to lift the frozen dead bolt lock.
“Who goes there on this friendless night,” he shouts
into the limits. “Me, you wild Canuck!,”

and rushes in; the room becomes alive
with dancing boots and fingers playing fast
unbuttoning coat buttons. Then his hat
goes flying through unwelcoming despair

alighting on a barren tabletop
creating something like a still life where
an active emptiness had darkly reigned.
And all that Calvin can sort out is Jack.

But that’s enough. If there was any force
he saw as friend, then this sun-weathered will
was one. Of all New England, only Jack
grasped anything of Calvin, Canada,

and why such distance circumscribed the two.
Too many whiskeys one extended night
enlightened Jack to Calvin’s narrative
of love and desolation, woods and blood.

Calvin had laced a small canoe for Anne,
his wife, from birch bark, rawhide, cedar, and
the cucumber magnolia flowering
in spring. They picnicked on the tributaries

of Saint-Maurice that May. But she desired
to see the great falls at Shawinigan
despite the twenty-seven miles of blue
demanding paddling up the river, north.

They gamboled underneath its rainbow spray.
Later while Calvin slumbered, Anne propelled
the craft alone too close to turbulent
surges of influential energies,

shocking her out of her canoe. She dropped
and struck her head upon a rounded boulder
and dreamt of eons washing over her
existence, wearing down her flesh to bone.

Her blood infused the river with an early
autumn despite the springtime all around.
And it’s forever fall in Calvin’s eyes.
But he’s five hundred miles from wakening.

“Wake up, you whiskey-addled devil,” Calvin
heard Jack’s invective-friendly voice as if
a foghorn on the river. “I’ve got news
that’s sure to make you want a double-shot

of something triple-worse than day-old snake
oil you call liquor, make you want to see
quadruple, speak in tongues, and listen up:
they’re building us chawbacons here a bridge.”

At first Jack’s words traversed impassive air
like Calvin’s ferrying the Merrimack—
the other shore stays distant, unfamiliar,
until that heartbeat when you understand

the far-flung shore is now your terra firma.
“A bridge?” he asked himself, forgetting Jack
to be the source of all particulars.
“And why a bridge? The ferry isn’t forfeit

enough? My services aren’t sacrifice
enough for sins? The river isn’t blood
one needs to wash his body in each day
but just impediment or waterway

to voyage above, some anonymous
abyss between inconsequential worlds
to travel over, disregarded and
forgotten, just another groundless void?”

Outside, the river surged upstream, an utmost
Atlantic forcing meadows, foothills, peaks
and all their distant runoff back to join
its source. Ice was lifting, fracturing,

collapsing over other slabs of ice
as history unfolded. Soon a bridge
would realize what the ice could never give:
firm footing over long disturbing currents.

While inside, Jack and Calvin downed their cups
of whiskey mulling over eminent
domain and Noah’s apple orchard placed
to sell. The window facing east was lit

with gritty hints of daylight. Jack arose,
raising his spirits high. “A toast,” he aimed
—they sight the river and the woods combined—
“it’s outside time you set these traps behind.”

THE END

On Seeing the Tsunami

for all in its way and its wake

I’ve watched waves crash like that before.
I’ve stood on safer ground like them
and photographed the curvature
of surge—an ocean’s requiem
to evident infinity.
But never had the breaking sea

continued on like that before;
I never had to turn and run
to steer clear of the nevermore
while unwavering water sealed the sun
and everything surrounding me.
I never saw that higher sea.

Octavius in the Workplace

He yearned to dwell in haughty office heights
and lose his common sense of vertigo.
His speech grew sharper, every word he spoke
spit acid in the eye of friend or foe.

Bit by bit he learned the ways to slay
and stay alive within that neighborhood;
in a world of snakes and vipers, venom
is the only tongue that’s understood.

The Lake

She dozes
in her rocking chair
between the news
and weatherman,
and dreams—
of summers at the lake.
Her long-late
husband loved to plan
his weekends there with her
as if
his work week was some sleep
he slept
to glimpse their lakeside
reverie—
his laugh would sound so deep
he wept.
And now she feels the water
rise
above her head—
she’s passing down
so slow. Surprised
she still can breathe,
she finds
the air livelier than
the one she’s breathed
these years alone—
she’s so familiar with
that undertone!

December Roads

I walk beneath the stunning
winter sun
another year.
It’s seems that I’ve been here
forever, ever
since the highwaymen
released my greener days
with cavalier
deception.
Now my eyes are blinded by
this last
enlightenment
which fills the sky.

It rides the pale
horizon—with a smile
that fills my spirit with
anxiety
instead of dread.
I’ve seen its crocodile
despondency before,
its watery
pretext.
But travelers have said its bite
feels nothing
as its awful howl
of night.

A Loon; A Sea

It was an angry sea that day
but loons were laughing in its face
and poking at its eye, diving
to that deep and hidden place
where calmer waters fill the brain
with something from the zen of Maine.

It's like a surfer in a storm
who longs to ride a wave that roars
within the mouth of some excited
river. People on the shores
expect his mad untimely death.
Instead he catches a second breath.

Or maybe closer to the point
a sailboat tacks in winter gales
avoiding rocky spits of land
with tongue in cheek—and smiling sails.
No one of a sound mind cruises
in a time of ice and bruises.

Except an odd duck, goose, or loon—
they didn't break a wave too soon.

Leaving the Scene

Two deer are grazing in the shadows
the marsh grass casts across the field
as sunset spreads. Their stand disputes
the dusk, and dark is almost appealed.

A swan glides in a nearby pond—
spotless as an expected snow.
With unwieldy precision, before dark falls,
it takes flight, slow, but straight as a crow.

Descendent

The surge keeps coming on despite the hour.
Along the riverbank the fierce debris
deposited in past high tides begins
to drift away. The shore turns watery,
and only higher ground seems safe and sound
from this insistent blur of history
—though there are those who recollect a flood
from long-ago when swells of tragedy
submerged the woods, drowning the common good.
Never doubt the potentiality
inherent in the current run of things—
no one can weather an emergent sea.
Its waves reflect that deeper anarchy
of nature, gods, and genealogy.

Bridge Construction Down to One Lane

He works that draw bridge—every morning this fall—
directing traffic. Lines—outside his line
of sight—develop, with commuters long
of face and first in temper. Never mind—
he manages emotions just as well
as transportation snags. So what the hell,

he’ll just enjoy the weather—sun and all.
The river stretches like a yawn downstream.
From underneath—he hears the currents whine,
then sights a motor boat—twin engines scream—
traveling fast beyond his influence.
He beckons both lanes at once—in his defense.

The Great Lobster Boat Mystery

As a lobster boat approaches near
the buoy marking where its trap is sunk,
it circles full, creating there a calm
that seems to carry on a larger chunk
of time than I had thought some likelihood
in such a busy sea. I understood

the physics following the waves and moon,
the ripples of achievement by the wind,
and even radiance of angled sun,
but why that wake could stay so disciplined
to be so calm so long eluded me.
It’s such a cool peculiarity.

Going Redder Miles an Hour

End of summer falls
on Roadrunner like an anvil—
splat! comes the autumn...

I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK

They plunked themselves around an ivory white
piano bar and belted out their show
tunes with that brightly similar excite-
ment found in sports bars, all except the swings
and blasphemies aroused in baseball fans
as lumberjacks become barbarians.
But hardcore Christians and their lion kind
will have the realm believe the fall of Rome
is built upon how aberrant they find
the former though the latter brings it home.

Walking on an Empty Beach in Heavy Fog

This fog is more confusing than
any expression could expose.
A black flag waves, then disappears
into some chaos I suppose
was pre-existing. Footprints tell
the story of an empty shell.
Sandcastles fall—back towards the sand.
The sea is just a narrow pool
with shores defined by now and then.
The wind has turned to east and cool.
A pickup truck steers slowly by
appearing to personify
the driving force of this disorder,
although I guess someone went fishing.
An old seagull is standing at
the breakers, staring out and wishing
for something only seagulls know.
My feet defy this undertow.

Diurnal

The tide recedes. The river looks
another lifetime older than
it did on Independence Day.

Boats align as compass needles,
considering upstream some polestar
that rescues immortality

or leastwise lends magnetic
personality to deal
with fears of going out to sea.

My coffee cup is running
over in this river valley,
yet I'm subjected to a dying

thirst for something stronger to ease
that last uninterrupted breeze.

Before the Christening

Rain has made the waterfront a new
creation in its saturated image.
Sunshine sneaks a weathered look between
the disappearing clouds and calls it good.
Boats in the harbor speak their minds in testament
truths that Adam painted on their sterns:
Summer Breeze; Blew By You; Overdraft.
It’s August, such a royal month for late
vacationers who disregard the waning
days of empire drunk with cricket song,
hung over, looking decadently famous.
By the dockside more than ninety feet
of fiberglass obscenity is
waking to the derelict—Breaking Wind.

Icarus at Work

At first he toils within the labyrinth
working his maps to crack a formula

he verified with twenty years of school.
But soon, discovering an algebra

not taught in textbook math, he learns to praise
the exponential. Relishing the raise

in fortunes that proximity to power
is bringing him, he sucks up to the boss,

despite the fact the man’s a lunatic
and sure as shit is bound to double-cross

him. Still he needs the self-esteem he earns—
although there’s something in himself that burns.

Tracking a New Development

Last night I tracked the fresh prints of a bank.
It must have leaped beyond the ATM
and landed on this hillside. Everywhere
its spent refrains performed a requiem
for woodlands—or some marching music played
on caterpillars, trucks, and renegade
bulldozers. Sky was visible where leaves
had once protected innocence and brute
survival. Following its scat and stride,
I ascertained the twisted torn-up root
of progress, if not evil. No surprise—
it’s not our nature to apologize.
This brutal innocence to forever survive,
despite knowing all trails will meet their fate—
good heavens!—leaves us helpless to protect
our inner landscape, never mind the great
outdoors. And then I wondered what I’d pay
to mortgage life upon this pleasant way.

Finale of Seem

in memory of Steve’s Ice Cream 1973

My life’s been rightly reckoned out
in hot fudge sundaes, worshipping
the god of chocolate—giving thanks
to whipped displays of fall or spring,
the summer going nuts, or merry
December eves topped with a cherry.
But paradise was Davis Square
waiting in line for half an hour
outside of Steve’s, the genuine
establishment and not the whore
of Babylon they bought and sold
for cheap confections plated gold.
Yet all things pass, just as my life
is dripping down its sugar cone
towards concrete cracks of nothingness.
The emperor’s world is overthrown—
we lick time towards some bitter end.
The ice cream though I’d recommend.

Ode to American Material Handling

They placed a bottom board
securely to some skid
creating for our trade
the pallet. We outdid
our distribution weight
with incommensurate
enhancements. Lift trucks rose
our storage space to heights
undreamed of in a world
of two by four uprights.
Three days became four hours
and low sad ceilings, towers,
through spans of Douglas fir.
O wondrous cosmos of
modern material
control, your loads we love—
you lift like Hercules
to send stuff overseas.

Something #1

I’m sitting on the beach
and looking at the sea.
There’s nothing to be seen
except the ocean swells,
their gentle undulations
underwhelming me
until I’m mesmerized
with sky, horizon, sea.

Columbus was mistaken;
earth is flat. The sea
is horizontally
aligned with that belief.
There’s nothing to be seen
except the ocean swells
until I see a splash
from out of nowhere rouse

the surface of the sea...
I’m sitting on the beach
remembering the splash
although the ocean swells
are mesmerizing me.
There’s nothing left to see
until I see that splash
arouse my memory.

Hatteras Forecasting

White caps mark the places where the winds have
influenced the waves with inspiration,
warning those of us who wade the surf line—
seas today are troubled past reflection.

Hatteras Fish Story

Somewhere in an endless ocean there’s a
splash that no one sees except this surfer
looking for the perfect wave. He wishes
that he saw the same this morning fishing.

Colossal Fog

The fog remembers when sheer sea was all
the earth knew, before land became the god
called Turtle, worshipped by the ones who left
to over-fish its once abundant cod.
(They gather at shores flirting with the sun.)
It wishes for them this oblivion
the Gulf of Maine concocts with dew point, depth,
and Frankenstein inventions from thin air.
So no one believes in monsters any more—
but those who know this coast of Maine beware.

Backyard Trinity

Behind their duplex there’s a pair
of train tracks drawn between the dots
of Portland Maine and Boston Mass,
connected twice a day by yachts
of steel through drafts of diesel fuel
sailing their passengers in dual

directions. But behind the tracks
a little river flows with almost no
objective but meandering.
Its hue is more pistachio
than blue and on its surface floats
a white canoe. No other boats

are visible. Beyond that stream
the task force of an interstate
pulsates with loud omnipresent
reverberations from the great
all-knowing Oz, not Kansas-bound
this time, so somewhat more unsound.

Cold-Blooded Observation

Roots have been exposed along this trail
as countless hiking boots have worn away
the earth around them. They look the way I feel—
like some spruce tree turned completely gray.
I see a snake! At first I think it’s just
another tendril loose from years of wear
—but then I spot its tongue. In woods we trust
but woodlands dwell in states of disrepair—
but not this snake. It slides with charm and grace
reminding me that movement is itself
a blessing.

A Realist in Acadia

The sky appears synthetic blue
next to the sea. Lobster boats
keep circling in their private wakes
while seagulls follow, sounding notes
of counterfeit condolences.
It doesn’t matter what He says,
no God would make this story up.
I gaze across the Gulf of Maine
perceiving slender scallopings
of clouds. I’d like to entertain
the thought it’s Nova Scotia’s shore—
because I know it isn’t Labrador.

Incident at Sunset Arms

The door revealed a badge
and close at hand a gun.
Tim couldn’t tell apart
these voices in unison
whispering disappear—
they sounded doctrinaire
in their suggestion so
he made the parking lot
his sanctuary. Then
he waited for the shot
that never came. His shoes
remained inside, the news
engulfed the TV screen,
and night would seal them in fast.
He knew his neighbor well
enough to know he’d last
the nightfall in a draw—
Kurt kept his own damned law
in ‘Nam and he’d be damned
to change it in the states.
Not Tim—he never aimed to.
(And now participates
as close as he would care.)
Some never have a prayer.

Tokens

The traffic pays her never mind
before depositing their thanks
and swinging for the mountaintops.
She doesn’t fret about the ranks
of hands enjoying their Saturday
—everyone is faraway
from where they want to be. She yearns
for tender currency or gloves.
Some fool in his Infiniti
imagines that the planet loves
his great round splendor, but forsooth—
the toll collector knows the truth.

Musings on Mystery Hill

There’s something in the mix
and disarray of stone
that coalesces on
a lifeless hill, this zone
worth scrutinizing twice,
which speaks of sacrifice

of early Celtic monks
who wandered mystic seas,
or Amerindian
ascendants, once the freeze
of glacial shock was past—
scenarios are vast.

An astronomical
divide extends between
its megalithic end
and dawning now unseen
—the sum of equinox
and solstice times these rocks.

Spirits cloaked in flesh
and earth tones pray for grass
to overthrow the dark
and fund the middle class.

One of the Oldest and Most IntensivelyStudied Forests in North America

In Harvard Forest, trees
eye each passerby
in silent scholastic gloom—
such focus could petrify
the strongest folk that walk
this earth—and when they talk

they sway the continents
in every branch of life.
They carve initials on
our breath with just the knife
of photosynthetic science.
Their roots in self-reliance

turn worlds green with envy,
driving arms to the axe
—there’s nothing left to do
but raise the property tax
on every acre of wood.
There goes the neighborhood.

Sonic Break

Beneath a russet cliff
this twisting gravel road
is balanced on a rock
slide. My episode
of trail-descending done,
I’ll break here as the sun

continues its decline.
There’s not a single sound:
no flow nor waterfall;
no squirrels stir the ground;
no birdsong nor jet plane;
no buzz, no breeze, no rain.

All glaciers have slipped north
and engineers spun home.
Summer is still to rise
while spring is yet to roam.
A crow beats overhead;
its wings would wake the dead.

Pondering the Medium

That Sargent Mountain Pond
lolls lushly in a col,
amid stark mountaintops,
provides the wherewithal
in place to call it mystic.
There’s such a pantheistic

conception to this spot.
Neither stream nor rill
supplies its source; it is.
Imagine if you will
this slight round pond no more
than fifty yards from shore

to shore and circumscribed
by birch and evergreen…
This April though I saw
its surface opaline
with ice, and pondered why
I deemed it still July.

Metrics of Hawks and Me

Ten hawks pass overhead
in random order, just
a temporary sum,
a magnitude that must
decline if hawks are true
to being hawks. A few

will start to separate
in circles like a cell
dividing from itself
itself, in parallel
geometries of chance,
a reckoned elegance

that leads me to this one
experience of flight.
Much later, on a peak
of granite, I will sight
a single hawk below
and measure vertigo.

Kennebunkport Dreaming

On Walker Point, the Bush’s summer home
prevails, palatial. Travelers will stop
their Civics, Focuses, or Golfs to roam
the ocean path and gawk. Their jaws will drop,
confronted by their democratic need
to scope out sure locations. There she blows!
Americans may love the pedigreed—
although its well-off points of view oppose
their own self-interest—if allowed to dream
that someday they may run their Walker Point,
Hyannisport, or at the least, some scheme
that yields enough resources to anoint
their children with that oil of destiny.
Meanwhile they’ll opt to sight the holy see.

Waiting for the Tempest

The sky was clear of every bird.
A slight near pond was iced up still—
no swan was waltzing in its calms.
Nothing stirred for a spell until
a sharp-shinned hawk winged into view,
then vanished earthwards to pursue
whatever life hid in the reeds
along the limits of that pond.
Again a void infused the air.
But then, as if Prospero’s wand
itself had shook, an eagle flew,
emerging from the hitherto
unseen. That hawk would follow fast.
Their wings expanded, swelled in flight,
imbuing my binoculars
with one round all-embracing sight—
which in perspective passed away,
beyond the marsh and over the bay.

A Close Encounter with the Primitive

Maudslay State Park; 2-29-04

I reached the limits of the park—
a sign nailed on an evergreen
read “No Trespassing”—but something slipped
within the branches. This hurried scene:
an eagle stirred its wings and flew
from cover, soaring towards that blue
free will of river. Moving fast,
I slid upon some unseen ice
—my feet flew out from under me—
and, arms extending, sensed the vise
of gravity become a thing
no longer holding in its cling
my being. Up I reeled to meet
that eagle in an atmosphere
unknown to me before that day.
Soon everything was quick and near—
the current, winds, and cloudless sky.
An eagle rose. I fell on high.

Growing Daylight

Imbolc and the Goddess Brigid

The blush returns to northern skies
as sheep will winter-lamb when filled with milk.
Snakes pour out from bitter earth,
to watch for shadings interlaced in silk
spun-frost, on slopes that front the sun.
The bride of light will not be undone.
That maiden from the tender east
lays hands upon ten thousand lifeless lakes
and lifts fresh water out of ice.
She spreads her arms on snowy ground—it breaks
into a land of patchwork green.
Her knowing sisters then convene
preparing folk to make a living.
Springs of words begin to flow in time.
Bright fires braze an iron mind.
The fruitless branch will flower to its prime.