Summer Solstice


I wanted to see where beauty comes from
without you in the world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of northeast meadow,
my pockets filling with flowers.
Then I remembered,...

Summer Solstice


In memory of Elena
We came home
from decorating
our friend’s cardboard casket
physically exhausted, emotionally spent
from comforting her daughter, her son
your best friend

We Are All Pilgrims
We are all pilgrims.
Some worship at the temple of materialism.
Some linger in the warm pools of Aphrodite.
Others trek to mountain peaks
or hidden springs,
seeking the...

For the Orchard

I want to tell you about the apple orchard.
How in the spring, when I come up over the rise,
blossom clouds soften the sky with a whisper.
How on summer afternoons I swim...

The Truro Bear


There’s a bear in the Truro woods.
People have seen it - three or four,
or two, or one. I think
of the thickness of the serious woods
around the dark bowls of the Truro ponds;...

To Save Yourself


When a crow nests in your hair
throw away your comb.

If a white dog comes to your door
drive it off. If a black dog
let it lie at your hearth.

A Cafe and You


I am in my own state of being
As the door to my sanctuary closes behind me.
No tears flow here
Just the joy of being in the moment.
When in my lifetime have I been more free?

Heart Labor


When I work too hard and then lie down,
even my sleep is sad and all worn out.
You want me to name the specific sorrows?
They do not matter. You have your own.
Most of the...

The Mower


The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.


I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I...

Stepping Westward

What is green in me
darkens, muscadine.
If woman is inconstant,
good, I am faithful to
ebb and flow, I fall
in season and now
is a time of ripening.
If her part

The Earth is a Being Who Deserves to be Loved


Wounded with bombs and highways, the Earth coughs, bleeds,
and warns, and is not heard nor heeded.


And still she loves, her tremendous heart...

Don’t Tell Anyone


We had been married for six or seven years
when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me
that she screams underwater when she swims—


that, in fact, she...

Listening to My Mother


My mother says the author
has a musky intelligence. Musky
because you can smell the forest
shoaled with the secrets of earth,
roots, hooved beasts nosing the ground...

Monet's Garden


I long in Spring to go againhttps://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2013-05-11_08-39-32.png
where the Epte weds the Seine,
to see the glories of Giverny
born on...

Blessings for the Tomb, the Cocoon, the Liminal Space



May you surrender to the tender gravity of your grief and loss

May you give honor and homage to that which has fallen away

May you...

Love This Miraculous World


Our understandable wish
to preserve the planet
must somehow be
reduced
to the scale of our
competence.
Love is never abstract.

We Have A Beautiful Mother


We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful

Exercise


First forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in

The Garden of Love


I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.


And the gates of this Chapel were...

Passover


Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . .
and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon...

Bush's War


I typed the brief phrase, "Bush's War,"
At the top of a sheet of white paper,
Having some dim intuition of a poem
Made luminous by reason that would,
Though I did not have them at...

Ten Years Later


When the mind is clear
and the surface of the now still,
now swaying water
slaps against
the rolling kayak,
I find myself near darkness,
paddling again to Yellow Island.

Another Spring


The seasons revolve and the years change
With no assistance or supervision.
The moon, without taking thought,
Moves in its cycle, full, crescent, and full.


The white moon...

Daffodils


I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering...

Ignorant before the heavens of my life


Ignorant before the heavens of my life,
I stand and gaze in wonder. Oh the vastness
of the stars. Their rising and descent. How still.
As if I didn't...