the stone at my door
called for two glasses of wine
between every verse

joy is a raw rope
no open mind shall keep
my best troubles

I counterfeit myself
a hole in my lodgings
a thin-looking wind

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 14 September 1662.

The section of the woods I call the moss garden was full of death angels today. The camera in my phone doesn’t quite know what to do with them, too deathly pale against the rain-darkened moss — they throw the white balance completely off.

I pass a porcupine just as she’s emerging from her door at the base of an oak. She must’ve heard me coming — her bristles are up. I stop and say Hi in a friendly voice. She gazes back, her beady eyes unreadable, retreating into the tree as I continue past.

I used to say that the porcupine was my totem animal but I don’t make that joke anymore. I let the boutique left convince me that this represented a heinous appropriation of indigenous culture. It’s true that more than once in my life porcupines have appeared like omens or indeed guides precisely when I most needed them. But I am not enough of a narcissist to believe they actually bother about me at all. Occam’s Razor suggests instead that they are simply wild creatures going about their lives, which randomly intersect with our own.

Which is part of the attraction, of course. The ideal guide would ignore me altogether! How dreary to be somebody, as one of my dead role models once said. I just want to vanish like a needle into the world’s haystack.

I should add somewhat parenthetically though that as a poet, one gets used to ascribing meaning to events in nature in a largely playful way, which preserves the autonomy of its actors apart from our narrative webs. This is the power of the lyric mode to elevate meaning without abstracting it from all context in the ummwelt. It’s why I believe everyone should practice poetry. It softens the hard lines between things. Its highest truths always take the form of a paradox.

For twenty minutes after the rain stops, the tree I’m sitting against keeps dripping on my boot. Arching my neck back, I can watch the drop gathering to fall, then feel it on my toes two seconds later: the sort of simple, synesthetic pleasure money can’t buy.

The same tree is dropping acorns, and that too is a pleasure: the minor thrill each time of having been passed over by the angel of hard knocks. Until I’m not, and a lump sprouts atop my head like a lizard’s third eye. I’ll open it every full moon.

a sky with just one aperture
would fit in a briefcase

you’d hear it in there
clacking its beak

i miss the flesh of my flesh
lost during the pandemic

i have been drowning lady beetles
in the toilet in the sink

the oaks are dangling blossoms
before every passing breeze

green and yellow like snakes
in the old folk song

i argue all sides of a position
and call it prayer

i am sung to daily
by my followers the flies

the hide under his fur
has weathered further than leather

and his rib cage still holds
a deathless canary

he’ll never fix that leaky faucet
you know the one

a chip chip chip
off the old flint

adamant under pressure
something gleams

the green of moss on an oak
three years dead

the green of greenbriar
on which a deer has grazed

the green of a bench in the woods
where vows were once exchanged

the green of garlic mustard
before it becomes too bitter

the green of ferns that have borne
the weight of snow

the green of winter wheat in the distance
when the sun comes out

the green of lichen on a rock
finding everything it needs

the green of leaves that won’t return
to a toppled witness tree

the old green of trailing arbutus
rushing into bloom for a few cold flies

Plummer’s Hollow, PA
March 17, 2024

Every winter I vow to winterize this old plank-wall farmhouse. Every summer, foolish woodrat, I forget. I blame Janus, that two-faced bastard. Resolutions aren’t solutions.

*

Just about every decade, I re-read the Norse sagas, I’m not sure why. It’s hard to look away from their grimy brutality and insights into human and inhuman character. Today: Eyrbyggja Saga. I’d remembered it had some horror elements but had forgotten just how many walking dead there were—holy hell. It’s the world’s first folk horror novel! Complete with a haunted cow.

i was your beast
of unburden

the arctic and its
crickets of ice

grew on me like fine
hairs of mold

i mistook a molt
for metamorphosis

but once we all knew
how to make change

now they round us down
to the nearest hole

and hand out wafers
of ukrainian jesus

my poems are ladders
that lead nowhere

i could be on a jet writing
contrails across the sky

instead of these two
scrawny lines

and land in a forest clearing
i think of you Dad

saying where should i plant
an apple tree today

a habit from boyhood summers
at your uncle’s orchard

continuing into your college days
on a motor scooter

with Mom exploring every mountain
and forest in Pennsylvania

the fall and only the fall
was for apples

culminating in your favorite
the stayman winesap

but after all those cores
for all those years

you’re in the ground
now yourself

and i keep looking
for those wild apple trees

the sun was a letter
of the alphabet then

my stomach could pronounce it
better than my mouth

on the walk to school through
two centuries of wreckage

past a ghost village
and the end of town eaten
by the interstate

along train tracks we knew
to get off of when
they started to hum

up over the wooded hill
in the center of town
with its water tank and cemetery

past hidden rooms
with walls of wild grapevines
whispering truancy

down into the industrial classroom
a prison of numbers

where zero seemed to hold
all the keys

without issue i can feel the forest
thicken within me

build up fuel and hunger
for that incendiary spark

ah to slash and burn
plow and harrow with my ancestors

or cut down the old giants
and replace them with windmills

deadly flowers scything
the air for migrants

our doom laid out
like a meal for ravens

fates intertwining like fingers
at a lovers’ leap

a mile and a half up a mountain hollow
under the green banners of the sun

I live above a crawl space
too poor for a cellar

my garden is a banquet
for slugs and meadow voles

the wild mountain mint hums
with solitary bees