Writings
swallows at daybreak –
pure inviolate sounds
the flit and splutter
of their antic rounds
across lake glass
dipping their tails
mid-flight and lambent
translucent inkwells
left pooled and pooling
toward the outer shore
a water-pocked trail
their signature
Blood Moon Blues
protesters marched
shutting down cities
senators sponsored
their own annuities
car bombs were back
hem lines higher
forecasters tracked
low fronts and fires
children were told
their parents were thugs
governments banned
playgrounds and hugs
analysts mourned
stagnating markets
terrorists surveyed
expanded new targets
refugees crossed
invisible borders
arriving malnourished
colder and poorer
high up above
a blood moon rose
the seas churned on
the shore decomposed
Venus and Mars
ascended in unison
glaciers kept forming
palatial ruins
while higher yet
at the back of space
a star imploded
leaving no trace
but hydrogen and helium
the seeds of our genus
potent as love
or a neutral virus
Augury
Orion’s sword glints in a sky gone platinum
as winter cuts its teeth on a bone-white moon.
Oak leaves, frozen, tremble like seraphim
mauled by a gale whose tin-whistle tune
strips the season of its last live harvest,
scattering windfalls like abandoned ballast.
November. Midnight. Soon the Geminids
will fade as portents reduced to rumor,
as gravity takes hold, mortals and demigods
tempted to read in each burnt-out meteor
reprieve or good omen traversing the skies.
The planet spins on. The oceans rise.
False Cardinal
Just before sunset a cardinal sets
its doo-wop-chirp-chirp atop an elm,
a knot of flame like an epithet
inside the evening’s sky-blue dome.
Spring again, the cardinal’s return
now three weeks early, revenant
of a future we’ve come to learn
will see the planet dead and spent
or not, or maybe so, while likely
the cardinal’s song, undulant still
in its late-day-last-call reveille,
will find us at evening facing west,
transfixed and emblazoned, a cardinal
sun sinking in each pane of glass.
Oracle
We look to nature for what we long to see,
a cloud’s dissembled face in the aqua blue,
the reed-buffeting breeze, the slow shamble
of water chuckling the creek bed’s gravel.
Whatever is hidden at a glance’s edge
the mind will have it – a bobcat spotting prey
too far outside its burrow’s sunken cavern,
the spider stalking a fly in the nimbus of a web,
the owl’s muffled flight, the pewter gleam
of a muddy river’s eel, the tympani of ice
thrumming a lake’s black kettle – marginalia
in motion within this evening’s pregnant calm
are palpable yet invisible, magnified
dark silhouetted hills dilating before you,
dusk sharpening their backlit ridges,
talismans at twilight, the whir of birds.
Turtle
Shy panzer of the swamp, atavistic
in your haughty calm, you blink at us
encapsulated in our swanky Prius,
crossing the road from the prehistoric
world you’re going to or coming from
to lay your eggs in the sandy bed
of tomorrow, knowing like the dead
that, however slow, it indeed will come.
And does, even if absent of you—
sanguine, curmudgeonly, immemorial
as mud, or the memory of mud
propelling you on as you cling to
your path through fan-tailed ferns that flood
our eyes with green heraldry, fresh and real.
