.

house creaks around us

      snow hisses

      through the trees

      We are alone

      wrapped in the wind

      I light a candle to write this poem

      mirrored black in the pane

      this storm will not end

      this night through our curtain of sleep.

      In Michigan

      1

      Here like the tropics

      in summer

      in the forest, in the lake

      or where the forest ends

      a desert of dry grass and stones

      over dirt roads, the heat

      making you one with

      the air

      and thus not being one

      separate

      from that which surrounds you

      You rise in early morning

      and for an hour

      feel yourself

      the boy again

      in love with summer

      the heat, the baking sun

      the indolence of planning

      nothing for tomorrow

      2

      I never knew

      my father as a young man

      forty-four when I was born

      fifty as young as I remember him

      but in the brown photographs

      from “the Great War”

      he is young, younger than I

      and he calls me

      to come back

      a dream that couldn’t escape

      the businessman

      who rose every dawn

      to his last years

      The Revenant

      Near the end

      strange light filled the sky

      cast no shadows

      turned dark trees to light

      we knew it was time

      Say what has remained unsaid

      Dreams

      we make dreams

      sometimes dreams

      are enough

      Lightning crossed the clear air

      trees stand motionless in the wind

      It’s colder now

      I love you

      or wisdom never was

      Two Clouds

      These songs

      may be known

      without singing

      Five black crows

      who steal corn

      A pine forest

      surrounding

      individual trees

      A power line leading

      to an empty field

      One brown apple

      sweet beyond tasting

      Two clouds

      that pass only for clouds

      In Ruts and Stars

      The season’s a matter of weather

      not time

      though still February

      the ground runs soft with mud

      the snow, porous and lacy

      There is no greater truth

      than what I see in this landscape

       O ever-returning spring!

      each man, this earth

      and the way he sees it

      I’m sitting here in the woods

      It could be a hundred years ago

      and I hope

      a hundred years to come

      that buds will set in a hundred autumns

      and snow a hundred winters

      a hundred Aprils of violets and lichen

      that there will be

      ever-returning spring

      wildness unchanging

      It’s turning colder

      the mud

      freezes in ruts and stars

      A Mask

      How could she know

      I cared

      more than passing

      I spoke

      in the guise of study

      of “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” “Among

      the Untrodden Ways,” of

      “Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning” and

      Sonnet 14 Browning

      In terms of line and metaphor

      I talked

      that these poems might speak

      for what

      I couldn’t say

      from A Year’s Turning

      WINTER

      Through the dark

      which gives it light

      for us

      Polaris

      the first we see

      is not so far

      fifty years

      counting by how light will burst

      with time, through space

      Watching this star

      pulls me from this place

      my feet lose the ground / I

      am nowhere / everywhere

      I saw a bat

      dusting the ceiling

       I thought they slept in winter

      and killed him with a tennis racket

      Shock in my wrist

      he spunked like a hollow ball

      and faded on the floor

      but