Saturday, June 27, 2015

World in a Pond




World in a Pond

Trying to do more right than wrong,
climbing the livelong day,
                        at times the most                        
surprising allies arrive to stand beside you.
Raw volunteers shaking sleep from their eyes,
ready to lend queer shoulders to the wheel.

Today, that magical rock crevice we called
                                    The Pond
when it filled after several days’ rain
and morning found a frog, or two of them,
calling it home. Plopping and diving                     
and floating up goggle-eyed to check us out.
We brought them minnow companions, scooped    
with a little dipper net from the bay, snails
and crayfish, sunk in clumps of cosy moss and
grass weighted with stones so bright-veined
                        under the clear water.                       

World in a pond all our wonder and attention,
                                    absorbing us so
utterly we’d no regret when another day’s passion
snatched us away, too suddenly to watch 
Pond’s slow diminishment or wonder how its
citizens always found their way back to the 
                                                river.


Sunday, June 14, 2015

Recess





Recess

When a longtime bully steps away,
dank vile slab that’s been leaning hard—
you come to yourself in a sliver of air,                 
and blink, and breathe, and quietly say:
Those bricks, just bricks. Those faces, faces.
Not a toppling wall, not a jeering mob.
You tingle to brink in a skin of allow,
mineral light in your thankful chest.                  
Peace returned is the joy that throbs.
World’s your home as it always was.





















Sunday, June 7, 2015

The Notes




The Notes

The hardest test they leave until the end.
But there is no age in these notes of Bach
making their way through two floors to the basement,
unless it be in the feeling way they waver
and pause, testing the extent of silence,
stepping respectfully over blankness
like a walker crossing the first autumn
ice or the ice of a suspected spring.
All of the player’s seventy-nine years,
her husband’s death at ninety-nine and her flight
across continents “to be with others”—
it is all in her submission to and
acceptance of these gaps, the embrace
the old give, since they must, to stopped places.
Otherwise her playing might be taken
for her granddaughter’s, lately practising
the same invention, except the latter’s halts,
being external to her intent, are surly,
faltering forming no part yet of what she knows,
and she rushes to repair them as she should,
leaping the rest no composer asked for
to catch the dropped melody, learning to read.










Thursday, June 4, 2015

Bier



Bier

Bucket-plumbed drafty old shack
close by the river, alcoholic,
beating his wife’s teeth out, she
got mistaken for his mother;
could cook shore dinner for eight
easily, pickerel and spuds sputtering,
coffee boiling, beans bubbling, hands
passing deftly in and out of the flames.
His death the artless violence of his
life, a daftly gentle dismantling,
drunk insensate in a cedar boat
adrift on moonlight’s current, unfelt
quickening, then gulp down Recollet Falls.