A single cicada
alighting in a field's
solitary sycamore
stridulates at length
and fills the sky
with song -- transparent
as membranous wings
extended in flight.
BROOK IN THE SKY
Astride bluegrass spangled with sapphires,
At Outcrop�s Bluff, the rock at his feet
Across the valley, wreaths of mist
ascending, glancing back over their shoulders �
ANT DANCE
He found it difficult to tell which
cut off at the ground four or five
one, two, three, four,
On the blackened stump danced a flicker,
yellow line on her wing. She probed
angling this way and that, gamboling
CANADA WARBLER
Oh, wow! I say, when I see you alight
Through yellow spectacles you gaze at me,
Those slaty streaks which necklace you
with splendor surprise makes keen, while it
What heart must beat within your breast,
what steadfastness holds you to what you are
COMPOST SONG
O blackened, broken, clumps of compost, you
You�re star dust's flight of particles compacted to stone
You�re bubblers, chloroplasts, breathers, kindling again,
CLINGSTONE PEACH
To the east the lightning burned itself out,
The man enjoyed walking his black
with savory fragrances � brook stones graveling
A flock of them, taking fright, undulated
The man was startled to observe, in their soft
With a feathering rush, a second flock...
SEPTEMBER SALTS
The early morning air was soft. The moon
Cape Cod, yet its cyclonic reach still freshened
An elderly man paused, half closing his eyes....
trim � or let her heel some more, and run
He stood at ease on sea legs, on cockpit planks,
TSUNAMIS
Shock waves flooding my ears rouse
Our cairn terrier Weftie has erupted,
Barking, he becomes a quaking volcano,
�Good boy,� I say, to calm myself.
THE BIRCH AND I
On the third day of quiet drizzling rain
When the sun came out, I grasped the thickest in both
lay spongy, honey colored heartwood I squeezed
Invisible microbes had worked their mysteries, darkly
alike � they spiked up the sapling birch, and dropped
THUMP-THUMP IN THE SUN
It darted out, and sounded thump-thump under
He gazed long in his rear view mirror and watched
He made no move to stop � though part of him really
Perhaps the pet of a little child in this rural
He�d speak that day for the Alumni Club. But who
THE NEWS
GODDESS -- OR ANIMA?
And there she is again, Goddess
her lips full yet delineated in repose
ROCK GARDEN GREENHOUSE
On his knees at his work, he loosened a spot
Digging in a fertilizer rich in potassium,
He grasped from the mower�s bag a humid
to keep them dark for germination, retain
Hunkering back on his heels, he gasped
all striving, and thriving, on fecund rock,
CAPRICCIO
My carpals and metacarpals bow their strings, We
Arousing myself, slowly, from the warmth of bed
Grossly luxurious golden overgrowths of forsythia
To feel a sparrow's downy feather, shed
The shears fighting forsythia back � I am!
KNOCKING ON HIS RIB BONES
�You scarcely know what a safe passage is!�
beneath Mount Mitchell's peak. He paused. He knelt.
He felt them knocking, knocking against his rib
He rubbed their open faces with a clayey forefinger,
He cherished feeling their raw grainy angularity
burned down, as the trail bridged a brook running,
He carried the two halves of stone to the brook,
MOCKINGBIRD
While walking, the rising sun flaming
He searched the sky. There, on the barest
of sky's initial light, her exquisite
BREATHING THE BIG BANG
In.... Out... he observed the terrier,
He let go as best he could the frivolities
Down... it fell, respiring carbon
LUCY'S RIVERINE FOREST
On looking out his window from thirty
He couldn't make out the water at all
The naked river put him in mind
It wasn't hard to imagine earthquakes
It wasn't hard to visualize Lucy
Not hard to see her tribes spreading
NO NOSE FOR PHEROMONAL NEWS
He sat quietly in his chair, his mind
his shaggy brindled cairn terrier,
The cairn always smelled the pheromones
If humans enjoyed the elongated nose
SCORCHING THE TARMAC
Cockcrow. Devoid of stars. Prevailing breezes,
Atlantic air -- while overhead at maybe fourteen
in a slow roll across the sky, punctiliously
They search for a holiday feast for the inner eye.
to a distant then and there, I might could get
SCUFFING FROST
The November sunshine, at seven, scuds
The man is walking his brindled cairn,
He sniffs and snorts, his breath�s heat
THIRST
His thirst lay not in his throat, just
That he could live in the body again
The central transport, somehow, lay
He needed only to attend, in present
SALT WATER CELLS
So there it is, the void
It reins in every breaker.
him, save for lifting mists
THE NEWS
He briskly strode to the crest of the hill,
idling at the edge of Ledgewood Road,
The fading moon startled him by speaking:
from your vermillion horizon, a hearth so intense
them in nary a blue-white seething clinker �
BLACK-EYED SUSANS
LONGING OF A TRIBUTARY
My heart, like yours, pumps a tributary
With common eyes we gaze at the Farmington�s
We are the river�s ambulatory tributaries,
Then how, by what lack of generosity
also in me, as though your smallnesses
CHILDREN
Like limbs growing from invisible trunks,
wounds, crash perhaps to the ground,
RADIANT LEAF OF ROCK
A single leaf, a sugar maple
tosses toward me in erratic flight --
It scuds to rest beneath my brogan's
It delights in its hot mineral life,
will embolden my heart five fathoms
THE GAP
At last his body settled down
He counted exhalations to calm and quiet
He aspired to slip into the gap between
free of judgment, the place of serenity
Way � nothing so bold as that,
He yearned to slip into that rich gap
GIFTS OF COMBUSTION
At daybreak, mid-September, walking,
So much was out of sight! All summer
luminously back-lighted by sunrise, he gave
EYES OF SUN
As first light, the color of pewter,
Sunlight, in velvet slippers, silently
It poignantly steps among black-eyed susans,
SKUNKING YELLOW JACKS
�What you need is a skunk!� he said,
�I've had a bunch more run-ins than I like
�It'd be best to come back after dark.
�We had a nest in the ground. My wife
SONG OF THE CARDINAL
The sun rose up, squarely at his heels,
Observing, searching, his eyes eagerly
As robust a lyric from the tiny luminous
CHEEKS OF WINTER
The cheeks of winter � a foot and a half
A crow, rowing gargantuan wings,
To the crow�s song the silver gossamer
The man, impulsively jabbing up his chin,
QUAIL BEFORE THE SAW
In the cool quiet of summer sunrise,
Bobwhite coveys roosted, tail
The quail would let him draw nearly
All day long their wings would speak
clear cut, cut off at the knees � speaking:
PLANARIA ET AL
The earthworms are more than elder kissing
Through planet Earth we pass, by passing
The horizons we lift our heads to see,
Look in the mirror! Do you observe,
A stone one skips on a pond? Curved?
TORRENTS
She loops � with a right forefinger, in sand
Waiting for a breaker to wash it away
The saline waves pulsing in her body
Their blood red torrents quench crystalline
A shore breeze whips up strongly, whisking
LAVENDER TUTOR AT THE FUMAROLE
The minnow swam straight into the pupil
with unbroken gaze, into exotic waters
The minnow he'd never seen before,
energy radiated outward from her eyes
Despite his fear of the unknown, he followed
passion of his phylogenous past bequeathing
DOME OF GLORIOUS GRAVITIES
For WTJ
The man and his grandson, walking the dog
Below the moon, straight up the face
Their painterly tinctures might easily compel
�The sky,� his grandson said, gazing,
�Yes, it is,� the man had said....
It was a dome of material atmosphere, of sentient
a reciprocal breathing of tree and man;
he hiked with the sun at his back, throwing
his shadow the length of a soccer field.
so precipitously dropped away he leapt
backward in a flash of vertigo.
rose up ebulliently, scintillant in sunlight,
from Rushing Black Mill Brook, hesitating,
wisp by diaphanous wisp � and disappeared
in the calm deeps of morning sky.
had caught his eye initially, birch
or bird. Round the stump of a birch
nor'easters ago, stood a little
circular grove. He counted, pointing:
five, six, seven splendid
sapling birches as tall as he.
a black patch on her breast, a red
crescent on the nape of her neck, a brilliant
the stump with a long, penetrant curved
beak, in up to her eyes, pivoting,
impetuously, tirelessly, dancing -- gulping
down succulent black carpenter ants.
to rest from flight over slash pine and sea.
You do not search for haws in May.
then hop among the thorns that ell
your branch. You turn full breast to me.
above your yellow breast delight
me. You adorn the hawthorn tree
has yet to flower, on a morning of northerly
breezes like those that fan you south.
what might must drive your migratory mind,
what muscle must power your slaty wings,
-- a specular being -- who, without
a warble, vaults on wings, and vanishes.
unbroken light, you are the fire in the belly
of stone that never grows cold in the torch of the sun.
and water orbiting a minor sun � a zillion
quintillion wakings-up spinning to scintillant sunshine.
photon by photon, saxifrage by saxifrage, heartbeat
by heartbeat, compassionate sun in ashes of stone.
the thunderclaps lost their bombast; to the west
azure skies reclaimed their ascendency.
and brindled cairn terrier, which strained
at its red leash, nosing up � glistening
a path alongside a clingstone peach
that cheeped with sparrows resting their wings.
overhead toward a rock maple, obscuring
the sky for a moment with a throbbing of wings.
downy frailness, such a synchronous drive
of passionately beating wings and hearts.
a third... a fourth... a fifth...a sixth....
The clingstone, its fruit green, fell silent.
glowed down in a gauzy haze. Edouard had blown
well out to sea, far to the east, beyond
the Connecticut River Valley so briskly it slapped
a school yard flagpole's halyard against its mast.
The flagpole became his sloop�s mast, the flag
its sail.... The fluttering sheet he'd haul to a tighter
less close to the wind. Alert to rushing thrusts
of her wake, his hand held her tiller steady.
on the thump, slap thump of a brisk sea
lifting up its salt spray to his parched lips.
me at five in the morning from sleep, dreams,
luxuriant relaxation, the warmth of my bed.
defending our premises against the tinkle
of a dog�s tag I can�t even hear.
each yawp a tsunami overwhelming my ears�
canals, surging in the straits of my brain.
�You�re doing your job.� I bury my head,
the images I dreamed all beached -- or flotsam.
a birch limb crashed to ground in eight or nine
disjointed pieces, some as thick as my wrists.
my hands, and broke it over my knee. Within
its ring of papery, dry, white bark
between my forefinger and thumb, trickling out water
and waking up a minuscule red beetle.
splotching the heartwood. I mused: water, sun,
and a universe of microbes inhabit the birch and me
it down like a felled old codger; they raised up me,
a bloody bellowing newborn, and will fell me the same.
his right wheels, front and rear. Rippling
pain knifed his calves, quivered in his thighs.
its body, motionless on the tarmac, retreat in the sun.
wanted to. (And yet, it was ...just a roadkill.)
The body of a cat, doubtless feral.... Doubtless?
wayside, these isolated farmhouses, he sped through....
would speak for the child who fed the cat, cuddled
it in slender arms? And who would speak for Cat?
� or Anima? Her features look Egyptian
or American Indian: hair braided back,
pronounced cheekbones, bronze complexion,
profound brown eyes almost black,
in precise delicate feminine lines
scarcely betraying the smile that darts
in her eyes, her soul. I, longing,
reach out, take her hand. She vanishes.
of barren compacted clay with the tines
of a three-pronged rake winter had rusted.
he showered grass seeds down on the spot,
and tamped it firm with the palm of his hand.
clump of grass clippings already warming,
and sprinkled them, a greenhouse, over the seeds
their moisture under noontime�s parching sun,
and conserve their heat during cooling nights.
at the thought of Earth's innumerable flora,
and the more innumerable seeds of each,
our greenhouse earth, one among countless
planets, suns, in a rock garden galaxy....
are alive! Phalanges, plucking, answer, We
too! I wrap them around the warmth of ribs,
manipulating first the left, next the right.
on this, a deliciously cooler, blanket-up, late
summer Sunday morning, I remember: We�d
invested a sedentary Saturday cutting back shrubs!
had encroached and overrun our home. They are gone!
It's a morning like this that makes me fuss with Rene
Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." Hogwash!
in flight, floating downward, alighting on the back
of my hand... to feel forsythia, fighting the pruning
shears� jaw, slashing across my face.... I am!
My carpals, metacarpals, phalanges are fiddlers' bows
all playing a muscular Capriccio for strings, hand,
and heart, a melody that�s sweet, that�s felt. I am!
A voice had hailed him, from within a fissured granite
stone at the side of a rocky, clay-slicked trail
Unearthing it with both hands, he broke it in halves
against his knee. He cradled the two in his arm.
cage bones. He gazed at feldspar flecks, glistening
in the sun's brightening light, glazed by raindrops.
plastering it smooth. Acutely sharp gritty
prickly crystals clung to his finger and thumb.
in the decaying lubricant of slick, wet, clay
as clouds rose up the mountain's face, as the sun
in ruddy, white torrents, down to the sea.
"So you, too, seek safe passage," he said.
knelt down on a dry boulder, launched them in frothy
ruddy-white water, and waved them on their way.
behind him, the sky a fading wedge
wood blue, the man heard a melody,
a lyric, laughing, cascading from overhead.
branch of a Norway maple, shedding
its yellow blossoms, a mockingbird perched
in sharp silhouette against the blue
melodic line striking up resonant
harmonics in the man. He chuckled, wet
his lips, and set to whistling her tune.
a cairn, lying on the couch, sleeping.
He sat in his chair and began to focus
on his own breathing. In.... Out....
before his eye, let go the voices
in his head. Up... the cage of animus,
the fire of oxygen, flowing in.
dioxide Gaia, in part, sent greening
the trees, in part kept locked in blackened
veins of coal and pools of oil.
thousand feet, it appeared to him
the riverine forest seamlessly snaked
an inexhaustible green toward the sea.
beneath the canopy of treetops until,
in landing's approach, he saw -- in naked
incisions, burning -- the river's banks.
of naked Lucy and her naked tribe,
distraught and dazed from quakes dashing,
rejoining, earth's jigsaw platelets.
abrading and thrusting Danakil Isle
on Danakil Plain again, rejoining
her tribes to riverine forests again.
pursuing her way up a riverine forest
while down it cascaded white water
she washed fresh roots in, drank, fished.
to the west, south down Great Rift Valley....
If Lucy could see what we her spoiled
legatees have done to her riverine forests....
on nothing in particular, eyes closed,
when, in a pheromonal moment, he smelled
heard him scratch a flea. As for keenness
of scent, man was no terrier.
of fear, and joy, no matter how
elusive or slight, a human secreted.
for tell-tale pheromonal molecules, lies
would cease leaping like fleas to our lips.
easterly, too subtle for a wet finger to sense,
bring far inland the softly moistening North
thousand feet the sleek whine behind
a Boeing 747, gliding in on Bradley
International's long radar beam, whispering
tracks an invisible path to its linear screech
scorching the tarmac. I feel for those aboard.
I, too, myself, am ravenous. Yet, I leave
those holiday spreads more ravening than when I sat
to eat � it's almost as though by hurling myself
away enough from here and now to see
who I was, yet never who I am.
over treetops in the east, illuminating flaming
vermilion and golden maples on the valley�s
western slopes, and beginning to melt
the frost on the grass alongside the path.
whose black proboscis is scarred gray
by the wear and tear of his vocation: scuffing
it in frost, poking it wherever he might trip
over scents eluding a more elevated snout.
adding to the sun�s; indeed, he�s part
of the sun, melting the frost -- releasing
from leaves of grass aromas arising
on vapor invoking a whole new view.
assuaged with clear, sparkling water.
It lay deeper in the anatomy, in subtle
body, perhaps. He was learning.
and less in mind's endless mentation,
transporting thought as clouds do water,
in purple thunderheads, woke him up.
in sky, in rock, in gaps between thought,
transcending thought by means of body!
At 63, he felt close to discovery.
time, to see, to touch, to taste,
to fathom a quenching milieu that was,
in every quantum of attention, new.
he fears, the death within.
A quiet reigns over thought.
It glitters no ripples up.
The calm -- oceanic -- stills
of angst, particles surfing
home on waves of quanta.
turned round, and noticed the single cockeyed
headlight of the bulk route hauler�s truck,
a figure lifting off the tailgate a bundle
of fifty or sixty morning papers.
�The news is not in newspapers. It screams
instead from the canopy of stars receding
a painter can find its hues nowhere
on a palette, so intense a coalman can find
the news is, this skyline is your chosen hearth,
your singular forge, your smithy of soul.�
of the Connecticut River; my lungs, like yours,
breathe Barkhamsted�s ethereal spirits.
velour-like vapors in bluest skies;
we slake our salt thirsts in its downpours.
the river manifesting in us outside
its banks of roots and mud and grass....
or courage do I judge you, your walk,
your talk, as though such ditherings were not
of spirit weren�t also mine, stuck
as I am, my eyes blinking back mud?
at times they cut off their own spreading
branches, crack under winter's crystalline
ice, make a habitat for ebullient
insects, die slowly of hidden
toppling my heart � they bear their souls
to the fore as they are, not as they�re not.
They try to accept me for who I am
and would that I, too, would them.
radiant in manifold hues of crimson,
glistening in November's cold rain,
its palmate blades fluttering in the wind --
and touches down at my feet on its stem.
toe, its lustrous ruddy veins
dissolving a glistening flake of snow.
promising if I plow it deep in my garden,
its sweet bounty will fill my belly,
deep with fortitude facing the ripening
rock we inhabit � indeed, we are.
in deepening relaxation, his ribs rising,
falling, the wind in his nostrils whistling.
his mind, an unruly child which misbehaved,
bodily throwing itself this way and that.
his thoughts, to enter the lidded glimmering
liquid iris of sustained quietude
between the stars of his own spiral
nebula � not the gala Milky
but merely to enter the galactic space
within his own subtle body.
of infinitely deep intelligence beneath
persona pretending to be himself.
he caught the first sight of his breath,
a vapor dissipating upward, facing
those glowing coals of a smoldering horizon,
the Eastern Star departing from sight.
he'd drawn his breath unconsciously: In
and out, in and out, in....
Now, to an ancient giant rock maple
towering up before him on a hill,
his tree-building breath: dioxide of carbon.
The maple�s gift � of oxygen � he inspired,
heating his blood to a passionate, glowing
red, as combustible as slash pine�s pitch.
arrives above our valley, it wakes
me up to a sky of cloudless crystal.
steals over the top of an eastern ridge
and tiptoes the brow of a field of weeds.
illumining each with such spirit
I become them, eyes of Sun, smiling.
laughing. �Yellow jacks are a delicacy
to a skunk. Looks like maybe you've got
one. Gnawed green paint off the cellar
window frame they're flying behind.
to remember,� he said, �and I am scared
of �em. They smell my fear, they seek
it, seek out the heat of our bodies, or,
at dusk, the heat even of a flashlight.
They're sleeping. A nest out in the open
the skunk would've probably got by now.
It's clearly in the wall -- the gnawing
shows you that. I'll call the Bug Man.
made a trail of kitty kibble from the nest
to where she'd seen them skunks, passing
at night. Come morning, their hole was all
tore up! She skunked them yellow jacks!�
and, ruddy, swollen, the moon set down
ahead. The man strode up the hill.
A cardinal's singing pricked his ears.
swept the barren red-budding limbs
of a gigantic maple. They alighted on a single
flame emerging at the point of song.
throat of so lofty a creature � no larger
than a man's hand � must be some alchemy
of ascending sun and ruddy moon.
of fresh snow on ice which squeaked
beneath the man�s brogans as he strode
in the quiet of the Ebony River valley �
ascended the ridge and climbed the sky.
and cawing twice as he passed overhead,
alighted in the top a rock maple
rooted on the crest of a steep hill.
He fluttered to his nest in a high crotch.
of ice, shagging the burnished deciduous
twigs and branches thrusting skyward
from trees rooted on the snowy slope,
lifted up no antiphon but crystalline silence.
sang out, �Caw! Caw! Caw!�
The crow hopped out of his nest to a branch,
looked down, and rejoined, �Caw! Caw!�
The cheeks of winter, thawing, glowed.
headed for a day's work, he'd drive
out Hontoon Road, stirring up corduroy
dust beneath the night's dew.
to tail, or scratched for worms and grubs
among the knees of pecky cypress
trees expiring as the swamp dried up.
abreast of them before the rumble
of tires flushed them up, in blustering
flight, their wings thrashing in sunshine.
at the drum of his inner ear against the howling
blades ripping sapwood, and stripping
the heart from prostrate Pecky cypress
Think not, too bad for swamp, for trees,
for quail; nor, there but for the grace
of God.... For they are you, you they.
cousins. They are our essential selves.
We all are planaria, passing through.
the earth through us, through our guts,
stretched horizons, "lying on a plane."
to choose, to stretch our guts to meet,
become ourselves, becoming or not.
smiling, an earthworm? Look! Do!
The plane you elongate to, is it flat?
Transcendent? Vapor rising, rain
falling � holons of Earth, of Sun?
moistened by a torrent of frothy, glistening
suds � the fish shaped sign for Infinity.
she loops it deeper with a strong thumb.
She begins to wait for a rising tide....
arise, their vigilant neuropeptides breaking
on innumerable shapes of silicon-based cells.
thirsts with hydration, nutrients, information,
giving intelligence life until sundown....
and sweeping from dunes behind her torrents
of sand, torrents of intelligence, torrents....
of his left eye, and out again, seizing
his unwavering attention. He pursued her
� fern waving in the current of a slender
smoking fumarole on the bottom of the sea.
slender, sequined; her eyes had purple
pupils! An iridescent luminous lavender
suffusing the length of her whole supple
electric, tapered, darting body.
his new tutor into the rising mineral
heat of a fumarole, straightaway into the saline
the salty passions of his own blood.
Lovingly he embraced it -- as it had him.
at five on a July morning, greeted,
in a lavender sky, a full moon
with craters so clear the two could almost
feel their slopes beneath their feet.
of Rattlesnake Mountain, climbed trees
in every green imaginable, illumined
by dawn�s light, palming their leaves
in fresh Canadian jet stream breezes.
an artist's eye and hand, young
or old, to brushes, knife and pigments,
to portray on canvas a palpable feeling:
affection for Gaia, gratitude for her gifts.
his eyes sweeping from the fiery reds
the earth's spinning atmosphere kindled
in the east, to the lavender blues dwindling
in the west, �is really much like a dome....�
And so it was indeed, the man
reflected, resting in his chair after
their walk, and feeling the throb of arterial
blood in his buttocks against the cushion.
life partaking in extraordinary and glorious
gravities: the communication of earth and moon,
mountain and tree; the reciprocal mineralization
of rock and man and every being;
the uncommon common salinity of seawater
and blood; and his grandson's soul, and his,
sojourning this planet, seeking to understand,
beneath a dome both translucent and opaque.
