A Dark

A Dark 

Burning,

Always burned

With dishes in my hand, I climb the oak stairway
To the bright light, angled through split panes
Into the middle of the room, which is 
Surrounded by smaller rooms.
Moving from the center, I space the steel forks
And steak knives on folded cloth.

In time, there is stillness

My eyes follow a light to the corner 
Which hangs over a dark summer pond.
A woman is staring from the doorway.
Her hands are at her sides, speaking without echoes of
Sound. Here eyes fall on me without seeing.
She has been burned, but is whole.

After, always remembering

I am afraid I have seen her undressed,
And so follow the stairway
And tell the women what I have seen.
All sounds flow through them,
As a crash of glass on greasy tile -
Shouting and running the hallways.

To be living, still living

Breathing through me, for a moment.
I return, and check the room, the stairways,
The only exits. She is gone. She never was 
Real in all these years I have lived.
I have seen enough to know now, what is
Real in this world.

All things moving, time

Now, outside the ruptured walls
Of the world, the silver sounds in
Daylight. The reckless willful men find
Ways to gamble, to send flesh in motion, to
Rend it inert and terrible. To will it become trapped
In a world it never wanted to make.

Burial Mound

Burial Mound

There is a mound of earth near water
That rises alien and circular,
In full-view of the highway
And passing cars
Who take no notice


It swells to block the sun

As it descends.
And surely it must hold
Some power still,
In the roots down beneath
Where life has flowed
Down,
And down the river
In ages past

Even now
Many times I have wondered
If something flowers beneath it
Or if it has delivered those that it contains
To some other place with flowing waters.


I have tried to count the time by its trees,
And I know it must have been made by men
Long ago.
The river people,
Or the woods people,
Who called themselves by their own names.

And I wonder if once-living things placed there
Have given it some sort of life
Given it those arms
That reach upward inch by inch
And hold out some hope of rising.

Or if its circular shape continues beyond our sight,
Or turns opposite within the earth,
And contrary to our knowing.


If we the living were to descend there
I think we might be transformed
And plunged back out
Into the full bright sun;

Into the turning wheel,
With frail arms to reach ever upward

 

Towers

Towers

The watching fields are held on earth - 
Wavering in silence, filled with eyes and nerves
Elongated by towers, stretching at angles;
Each clearing becomes a turreted fortress
Watching over the dreams of bodies.
The living world unchanged, yet seen.
As its dreams bleed through all borders,
All felt in unseen ripples, churning 
Through all veins, all corridors,
All places where surfaces meet the sky.

A Sand Shark at Linville

A Sand Shark at Linville

Beneath the bridge of marble stones,
Cut to fit by an artist from the old world,
I cast my line at the roiling green.
I am a child now, digging my old basketball shoes
Into the dark river mud,
Stripping the leaves from overhanging birches
With my hook and rod,
Finding small, colorful salamanders
In the muck beneath stones.

I bend to the river

My eyes find an unnatural shape in the curving
Flow, weighted against the river stones,
Moving with the current as if alive. But not
Alive. Minnows feed on the stringy alien
Gills, willowing in the flow.
I probe the open mouth with my toe.
Teeth snag on my laces, and open-mouthed
A sleek nightmare form chases my foot from the water.

I step back

It lies on the darkwater stones, bloodless
Small, black-eyed

I hook it by the jaw

Meeting the unnatural flow, stiff-tailed
Spinning off balance as a spider-line,
Not a fish anymore

Now, I can see that the river meets the sea. 
But not then

I cast off the line, for something to happen

Should I allow its bones in this place?
Is it poison?

The wimpling current does not take it. There is no movement of the body,
Only movement of the river.

I cannot leave it without hope. 

I cut a drop of blood from my hand, and mark its cold forehead. I leave it
Covered in a grave of black river clay,
A child within the living waters of the world.

The Moon at Dawn

The Moon at Dawn

The dark morning roads are
Renewed each morning with frost.
Slick, done with the night;
Each reminds me to look up
At the last glimpse of the moon
Draped across the dawn,
Held in some way stranger than night moons,
Waking the tidal morn
At the crest of mountains.
Seen from all angles of the earth - 
It is only at dawn,
When its power bleeds,
And our minds sleep to waken.

The Bridge / A Flood at the Head of Little Rock Creek

Winter Poems - 2013

The Bridge

As I passed beneath the beams
I saw a name put there
Many years in the past,
By a friend who had gone on.
And as the thought of him in this life went through me,
Some children began to cover the marks he had left
With a paint the color of clay.
These children had no way of knowing, and
I had no way of saying.
I had only the feeling
That my passing had been marked
And forgotten.



A Flood at the Head of Little Rock Creek

The dark veins of the mountain
Force clouds from the rocks
As the voices of cicadas beneath the earth,
Too thousand to count, exhale with 
The flood. The late greens stand before
Winter, even glowing, ever
While long waters flow.

Dark spaces shine in mist of rain,
The whole air is dense with living breath
Scoured deep in the earth
Carried down with a part of the sky.

I feel the electric pull of power
As I step down the bank
Near unreasoning force
Which neither cares nor sees,
Only moves with the world.

Beneath the waters small stones roll
Over others, breaking apart
Exhaling vapor as matter,
Resounding in the chambered streaming earth
Where deep veins are becoming 
As long water flows from the peak of Roan.

Down the stream there is destruction,
Loss and sadness. Men watch as their yards become
Strangling lakes, crushing unnatural weights
As water moves with the world, perhaps
To annihilate and return all to flow
Once again through its veins.

I watch as the stream becomes a clouded
River, forever, through the laurels,
Mossy stones, deer tracks, old bones grown young
And thinner. I pull the clean, wet life into my lungs
And imagine that all worlds are at some point the 
Same, and I am at some time without reference,
Soon to be returned to this sacred vapor.

Wherever life flows from such pure places,
It is held for a time in a strange dimension.
As I dip my hand in the stream, my burdens are
Swept to another. I see my life as it is. I am small
In the wake, frail in the current, immeasurable in the way
That all moving things waver.

From: Sacred Life - Fall Reflections - 2013

Fall Reflections – 2013

 

Eclipse

 

It is a genuine feeling, to let go of the old prejudice of dying

 

And those things that come with the shifting moons

 

I can remember, the warming balm as water and dust thrown together

 

The mercury rising, fading

 

Yellowjackets on crusty lunchroom boxes

 

They were angry at dying, someone said to me, angry at dying

 

It meant, to me, it meant an all-eclipsing dryness

 

I would listen at night hoping to stave off the katydids, as they signaled to me the end of things

 

I dreaded that first red turning of the forest walls

 

The freezing ground of morning, the cold rides in the tiny truck that smelled of carbon and firewood

 

The daily worry of a young man not grown and fearful he will never be

 

The uncertainty of seasons  - I wanted things to live, forever, in a straight line

 

In September we would ride the horses across the mountain to the old cemetery, and I would

 

Touch the birth-swelled pods on the edge of the field to feel the insect pop of the seed on my fingertips

 

I step over the graves and pray to them; they are timeless things I have always seen

 

I lead the horses around them and they crop the still green grasses and think of nothing, their eyes a bright stillness late summer hides vibrating with insects, veins under muscle, all feeling the shift of moons

 

I watch their chins for the first whiskers of cold, the yellow eggs of botflys, and other signs that life will grow

 

Again  - In time, I could see that life’s circle was the only true thing, and within it there is no end

 

The red inside the leaves is always there

 

The yellowjackets will sleep deep in the earth, all of one mind and body

 

Their death is only the shedding of old skin  - There is a peace in the dark insectless nights

 

In the cold of the moon, tangled in naked fingers, held in false light and waking

 

And sad that it will come again, all things eclipsed at evening, uncertain, eternal

 

All things moving in endless articulation, peripheral encounters overlapping in widening circles forever.

 

 

Becoming

 

It is a genuine feeling To let go of the old prejudice of dying And those things that come with the shifting

 

Moons I whisper in slow circles in the water I chew the ends of old baling twine I move in the weeds as

 

The bend of stalks Slowly, slowly I take form, growing larger Feeding I can see inside the world I

 

Emerge, knowing the way There is no stillness like mine No time I crack and slide, moving with the ways

 

And ways I can see inside the world I am becoming I give up my life, it is not mine I break apart, dryness,

 

All eclipsing, eternal forever.