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