Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
with every step a bird
takes in the snow
there’s another arrow
pointing backwards
the snow sprouts four
small gray feathers
as it shrinks in the sun
other things appear
fallen fox grapes
a bluebird hawking gnats
five small forest pools
at the head of the hollow
where reflections are still
a bit blurry
flat white ground
matching the sky
and the trees and whatnot in between
seeming to float
i get vertigo on a mountainside
blank as an unfilled-out form
anchor myself by looking at bare leaves
in the shape of a sleeping deer
any fallen seed or leaf now
becomes a botanical specimen
i look up from the page in time
to see a vole slipping back under
its dark pelt doesn’t stop moving
even for an instant
hypertension or flow state
or maybe a bit of both
the distant limestone quarry’s
giant steps
bring us no closer either
to the ground or the sky
It’s below zero Fahrenheit with a howling wind just two nights past the longest of the year. The juniper tree I planted next to the house thumps against the eaves. In my youth I’d be living it up, blasting the stereo while getting roaring drunk and feeding wood to a stove some visitors once dubbed Ol’ Sparky. Now I am apparently grown old, it’s sit hunched over a keypad and worry about what to do if the power goes out.
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.
to someone from the hills
how much seems to hide
in a river valley
where everything’s in the open
members only
says the dick pic
on the remains of a bridge
for a vanished road
you don’t belong
say the name plates
turned blank again by years
of riverside mildew
here’s the poured concrete
shell of a house
almost everything organic
has rotted out
if you put your ear up to it
you can hear the sky
over there a dry canal bed
with thirsty sycamores
and a pyramid built
to kiln quarried lime
strata standing on end
like books on a shelf
paged through
by omnivorous roots
every floodplain is built
on wreckage and erasure
this is an indian path
on the oldest maps
people wandering upstream
deep into the hills
but not like shad
returning to spawn
more like shadbush
marooned on mountainsides
condemned to bloom only
when no one’s looking
while the flood sows
its own seeds
pods and baubles
evolved to float
horsetails bamboozling the ground
into turning vertical
but it’s privet that crowds
so many others out
running rampant after its escape
from the hedge clippers
clinging to its leaves as if this
were still the old country
passers-by direct me
to a midwestern native
american wahoo with
its pink capsules blown
revealing the fleshy red arils
so like its cousin bittersweet
glowing in the low
december sun
a hillside boulder chooses
this moment to depart
ending its journey
a foot from the trail
a river flows through the heart
of a nearby mountain
banks lined with sycamores
limbs luminous as moonlight
and the ghost of a canal
there just long enough
for Charles Dickens
to patronise it
now it’s a rail-trail
looked after by local farmers
and in the late autumn light
it can still transport
i watch a large black ball
float sedately downstream
mergansers flushed by a jogger
fly low over the water
under the outstretched
sycamore limbs
with their summer hunger for sun
to make more baubles
i pass an Amish man
dressed in blaze orange
taking his rifle
out for a stroll
among crumbling walls
the exuviae of bygone quarries
doorways open into
what’s left of the earth
soot-darkened soil
where Dickens saw
light gleaming off
from every thing
when he took a brisk walk
upon the towing-path
and after nightfall frowning hills
sullen with dark trees
which were sometimes angry
in one red burning spot high up
colliers turning those dark trees
into mounds of charcoal
to feed the iron furnace
its stone stack roaring
enough like a volcano
they named it Mt. Etna
so much radiance squandered
on an industrial revolution
one remnant section of canal
forms a backwater
floating leaves
still in their autumn red
suspended like memories
among reflections
i pass the former iron master’s mansion
just off the trail
its gorgeous stone work
its collapsed porch
behind me in the distance
a rifle speaks
the river runs slow
and green
***
Quotes are from Dickens’ American Notes
getting unlost again
i leave the car at the overlook
follow the trail down
the far side of the mountain
where a flash flood preceded me
in the wee hours
scouring the steep parts
mounding up leaves on every flat
it’s the day after thanksgiving
and the day before deer season
a half-mile from the highway
i find a pair of black trousers
sprawled beside the trail
i fold them and put them back
the trail meets another trail
on boardwalks over a spring
passes three camp sites
on the shore of a long-gone pond
goes up over the front
porch of a cabin
and back into the forest
where oak and hemlock shadows
darken and fade as the sun
goes in and out of hiding
i leave the trail
bushwhack through mountain laurel
gape at a massive rock oak’s
full-throated silence
black birches perch
on exposed skeletons of roots
i follow forest roads
the second one gated
past what must be
a research plot
a large fenced enclosure
full of small flags
and much to my surprise find
the unblazed trail i’m looking for
back up the ridge
the forest on my right
facing off against pole
timber on my left
to the windy crest
its rocks and vertigo
gaps in the trees revealing
gaps in the clouds
patches of sun that cross
the next valley and vanish
while off to the south all
the mountains shine
here in the gloom pileated woodpeckers
are stripping bark off a tree
i pass three hikers discussing
the perils ahead
the clouds thin out
and the rocks begin to glow
sunset colors in mid afternoon
at a place called david’s vista
a young man appears
and climbs a ridgetop pine
in the bitter wind
makes himself comfortable
another david perhaps
hoping to be found
all around the great dead oak
as darkness falls
a fisher dances
hunting white-footed mice
a dark sine curve
against the snow
that is also somehow able
to freeze for long minutes
crouching pouncing
coming up empty
it is only i sitting across
the frozen pond
who leaves feeling
fuller than before
filled i suppose with seasonally
appropriate gratitude
for this beautiful small beast
with its wild blood-lust
for my encounter with it
once in a new moon
for the freedom it still enjoys
to disappear
the longer you gaze at the face
of a limestone cliff
the more beasts
begin to emerge
a puzzle of muzzles
a marl of snarls
don’t call them angelic
they’re not here for you
convening as if
to meditate on a corpse
where the creek makes a brief
above-ground appearance
oh white-breasted nuthatch
with your anxiety song
who’s to say what’s real
in a valley full of sinkholes
bare trees are brooms
for this bitter wind to ride
right into the earth
vibrating where they live
red cedars giving
shelter to juncos
a locust still ornately thorned
against mastodons
threadbare hemlocks
unaccustomed to so much sun
i follow the groundwater
back underground
and my glasses fog up
in less than 50 feet
the creek has gained
echoey voices
that may or may not
be cave divers
drowned in pursuit
of an inner space
hidden from the sun:
a grove of impossible trees
stems said to be slender
as drinking straws
having long ago met
their better halves
growing down
as they grew up
i emerge shivering
into the frigid sunlight
the cliff is empty
i come to no conclusions
at the next farm
a hundred goats
graze their pasture down
to the nubbins
burning some old barn
beams for fuel
the 19th-century knots
pop like pistols
and my train of thought
goes off the rails
forlornly blowing
its figurative whistle
into a night bright
with fallen snow
we’re all fugitives
from the present moment
in our distracted states
of america
no wonder it takes gunshots
to wake us up
i hear footsteps
in the kitchen
and find myself
in the bathroom mirror
happy to dwell
in this icy stillness
it’s the future
i’d like to escape
a choose-your-own-
doom story
we picture as a shining city
on a hill which once
might have been more
like a mountain
summer is dead
i found her green leaf body
at the foot of an oak
in the first snow
blanketing the valley
the smell of diesel
100 feet downridge
there’s a fallen nest
woven from strips of wild
gravevine bark
the trees are becoming
more and more vacant
though they shriek
and moan in the wind
i remember what jesus
said about new wine
and old wine skins
like this katydid lasting
long enough to be filled
with the unknown
like this spruce weeping
white beards of sap
from dozens of rows
of sapsucker-drilled wells
and all those wounds
somehow still open
summer is dead
they crucified her
two deer bound past
without seeing me
pursued as they are
by one with antlers
holding them high
almost shining
his rack as the hunters call it
his naked tree
