A Friend from Yeh

"In flowering willows,
we rein in our horses;
at parting, we are free
to drink all the wine we desire."

– Chia Tao, from "Memento on the Departure of a Friend from Yeh, Last Day of the Second Moon"







The plates-full of stacked
turkey and potatoes all eaten;
it is late into afternoon
now and the stomach winces.

I pull the dog across
the street to tie her to a tree;
she will skip around the dirt,
dig holes seeking scents under snow.

If friends were the pockets
of moon glowing over
the white frozen bay
I would be in abundant company.

A stack of books is waiting for me
inside alongside a flute
of champagne still bubbling
over the rim of thin glass.

Never Find Me Again

"The rain I watch fall in the courtyard comes down at quite varying tempos." – Francis Ponge, from "Rain"










The bittersweet berries are so vivid laying along their emerging vines in the leaved canopy as to remind one of something entirely else; there is no need to think that these are berries of organic origin; as though, corpuscle by corpuscle, they emerged through a season and exploded to such orange pearl-like beauty; you sense that this must be of a miracle; it is truly the only word that works your mind at that moment; look around at the rest of the knoll; see that the juniper is a raw and savage trunk, leafless but defiant, like the old woman who you see so tough at the bus stop and you stop to wonder how she has done it all these years – to rise, dress, no help of others, no handout, hair a mess under a scarped bonnet; but not these berries; cosmic; I would take oracular advice from the voice that it heeds; a globe onto itself, a little sun without heat; and I enter into it, as we all must one day, curl up, lay my head down, take a taste, and know they will never find me again.

One More Part
of Our Watershed

"Our old truck too, slow down the street,
out of the past–
It's all so old – the hawk, the houses, the trucks,
the view the fog–
Midwinter late sun flashes though hilltops and trees
a good day, we know one more part of our watershed..."
– Synder, from "So Old"







We haven't been here long this morning.
Just arrived. Can hear the highway
from a quarter mile away.

What'd the old settlers have in mind
here at Juniper Knoll?
Not far off from Leopold's Arboretum workshack–
his old work table still in there pungent
of bootdirt and old feathers
windows looking out over
Gallistel Woods, that mixed and strangled
thicket, bittersweet snaking up every trunk –
but here, at the knoll, little berm,
Junipers leafless all the way up to the crippled crowns
would never thrive in rocky sandy soil.

Fill up the truck with loppers,
those little flip out saws bent at the handle
for buckthorn and the occasional thorny castor,
fill up the boxes with floppy work gloves
and warmed up water for tea and chocolate.

Sun layers down in between the plantings,
microscopes across the ridges of ice crystals
where the dirt road mud has all hardened
like ripples of sea waves,
white and jeweled at the edges and so temporary
that you have to get down on a denim knee
to see the surprise of early morning frost.
So this is how the real world lives.

Three cranes right along the trail at Curtis
early autumn had hobbled forward
on thin legs as if a cadre of farmers with hands
clutched behind their backs inspecting rows.
Last owl perched up there still as a clock.
On the ledge of the manufactured savannah,
quizzical deer poking noses into the brush
flapping spirited tails in love with shadows.

It was Leopold
who just about died when the city said
sure as hell the highway would be built.
He planted a row of towering pines
to block it all out but the noise.

I pull red vines out from under soggy leaves.

Under the Tumult was Peace

"For the groaning sound of its straining timbers, and the engine throbbing like an overtasked human heart, had made the ship seem a living thing to me; and it was tired of the struggle, and under the tumult was peace." – WH Hudson, from Idle Days of Patagonia










Above, by mind, the dream
of that steamer led by Hudson,
what I'll never know of El Negro
is that the earth passed
and passed around the image
of the Patagonian Aracauna
as the Conquistadors might
but as mist and vapor and the speculate
of something never achieved.
I too see the purple sparrow
flit around the odorous thorn bush,
what, perhaps, Darwin saw
by the long port of the Beagle,
a chiseled land flawed only
by its counter mirrors of the flesh
of the native indian born to defend.
For me, today, it will rain
along the eyelash of the bay
here at the frozen fields
of the midwest by November.
It would not matter whether
I had taken the helm of a Viking
ship here at the Mississippi mouth;
to fly along the braided edge
of the bluff lines familiar
by old farm trails matter less.
Set upon the tortured beautiful
land of the Andes only I grow.
A heart by mind and see straight again.

Aerial Farm

"...the blue day opening
as the sunlight descends through it all like the return
of a spirit touching without touch and unable
to believe it is here..."

– W.S. Merwin, from "Before A Departure in Spring"









And before I had arrived by the old highways
that we remember when by car light our parents
knew the country roads back home to the cities
and those days in November after the fields
had been harvested stood like sun peach baskets and stayed
that way in our minds and we always wondered
what drove us from the family of the country
as today I stand in a farmhouse kitchen fermenting yogurt
the television in the corner quiet and unused
below windows that frame the fields of red clover
and fallen rye used I am told for crop cover
and there it is the picture I remember when ten
years old in my grandparents' white tall farmhouse
the aerial photograph of their entire acreage
I used to sit and watch that photograph
and wondered what it might be like to pass over
by small plane to capture the face of the earth
so interlinked by the purpose of corn and soy
a thousand little creatures hidden under their fallen
oak limbs as two cows stand against a wooden fence
silent as songs we only sing to ourselves
the only time their picture would ever be taken

The Felt Voice
of Land

"And we desire to see the world intact, to step outside our emptiness and remember the strong currents that pass between humans and the rest of nature, currents that are the felt voice of land, heard in the cells of the body." – Linda Hogan, from "Creations"












Olbrich by Night



Now by 5:45 on the way to a class at Olbrich
all of the clatter of the streets has quieted
to the softer sounds of cold bike tires
or the dog-walkers crunching stiff ice
the entire miasma of colors have ceded
to simple lightless slate off the faces of houses
where from some smoke lifts gray to gray
and somehow dampens the siren of ambulance
along the capital end of East Washington Street
and I feel I am of two persons at the moment
the one who had wished away the days' busy hours
filled by fingertips of keyboard tasks
and now the other who has found friend night again
the lake quietly awake in its corner of the watershed
reflecting white piers of lights from apartment buildings
the shoreline trees themselves speak of permanence
brush strokes lifted over the pages of beaches
the last seagulls bobbing white candles
who will tomorrow leap up from the water
and follow clouds blindly beautifully south
holding the voice of the teacher again

Peach Blossom Spring
Bed and Breakfast

"My home? I'm stopping near the town,
stopping in a peaceful way, free and easy.
My sitting stops with the shade of tall trees,
my strolling stops inside the brushwood gate."
  – Yuan-ming, from "Stopping Wine"










We rush out to the side terrace to rake the golden leaves;
they are rich and supple born by a wet a autumn;
a snow had come and then preserved them like a treasure;
quickly, quickly! I say to my daughter, always in a rush;
neighbors walk by in something that stands for peace;
a dog or two behind them on leashes as they wag and bark.
I look up to our wise yellow house and see it reflects beauty.
It is of the same colors as the beauty of autumn,
wet in places but resilient against the coming of winter.
I pull the rake into me and come to love the grass underneath,
the leaf piles like little mounds of memory and I want
to take hold of each and dive down into the hidden spot,
and listen to my daughter sing again and hear her smile.
I have grown old and a bit too brittle to enjoy the clouds pass.
By tomorrow my heart will burn with the fires of compassion.
Lost last year off the tree and let it seep to soil and seed.

Peach Blossom Spring
Bed and Breakfast

"Liu Tau-chi of Nan-yang, a gentleman-recluse of lofty ideals, heard the story and began delightedly making plans to go there, but before he could carry them out, he fell sick and died. Since then there have been to more 'seekers of the ford.'" – T'ao Yuan-ming, from Preface to the Poem on the Peach Blossom Spring










Now by November
here go the clouds
as hours along a clock
overhead white but
without numbers
and she said to me
sit for awhile and leave
your clicking work
reach up into it with
a fist and make it your
own hold it to your
breast for in the end
what else do you have
if not the eye
and the body your days
as they might widen
as sunlight to love
or grow up bone by
bone can you feel it
a dream has just floated
past and we could
not catch it the past
itself only a lost
season of leaves
blown to the street

Peach Blossom
Bed and Breakfast

"The other villagers invited the fisherman to visit their homes as well, each setting out wine and food for him. Thus he remained for several days before taking his leave. One of the villagers said to him, "I trust you won't tell the people on the outside about this place." –  T'ao Yuan-ming, from Preface to the Poem on the Peach Blossom Spring










An Art of Coming Awake


They say you will come to miss everything
remember those days with busy mind
trying for hours to do nothing more than escape itself
it had worked all day and rarely fell silent

Or a first snow that fills up all the open spaces
six inches high in a circle along the small table
the rooftops white and shine as a new kind
of velvet laced along the eaves and gutters

even so it is always happens we reach for something
other and have come to know these days
as something to move away from never
by the burning hot ember of coming awake