Category: Uncategorized

The great visible

body of the feeding swan:

the head deep under

and indifferent

to what others think about

its nobility.

Poets recognize

that one must root around in

mud for good verses.

”There are, notoriously, no criteria in the arts or sciences for achieving or executing integrated wholes.” Jan Zwicky, The Experience of Meaning, 72.

Summer dusk. A brief

flash of lightning in the trees.

We had stopped talking

as your health declined.

Only yesterday I got

the news you had died.

Who can I talk to

now? I’ll miss your sudden daft

wit in bed and out.

You’re in a class by

yourself, your shapeless shape now

a dear dreamed-of-whole.

More Summer than Fall.

But who can trust the old names.

Public Works restores

drainage pipes; old roads

are retopped for ice and snow.

Who knows the future?

Does even Nature?

A burly kayaker heads

out to the ocean.

Afternoon hazy

with crying gulls restlessly

hovering over

the cove. Shouldn’t you

be going somewhere? I wait,

a precipitate

of time. You cry and

fly about in the lazy

last hours of summer.

Nobody’s out here

today. There’s a cold wind the

sun makes colder. The

gaunt pine bristles with

light. Still I sit under it

and watch the dark blue

waves roll in, deeply

folded with glassy black sides.

I miss my father.

”Only the finite can be augmented. The giving augments the being of the finite, in the sense of making it more than nothing, making it to be, with an otherness that is its own.” Desmond, G&B 313.

Debts on my mind, I

have never been free of debts.

Some can be repaid.

Capitalism will

kill consciousness if you let

it. I take a walk.

In the cove, under

the plantation garden, an

egret steals color

from the dying day.

Ducks take one more turn. Others

flow as from Nothing.

I walk fast in the

Fall, my breath just ahead of

me. The Bay is flat,

slate gray. Once late the

available light picks out

in the tawny grass

a monstrous Mute Swan,

unearthly as a full moon

in the early dusk.

”Humility—a deep unconcern for the social fate of the self—is the foundation of courage as well as wisdom: it frees one to see the truth.” Jan Zwicky, Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis (University of Regina Press) p. 54.

During the day, down

at the shore, I listen to

waves crumble, waves re-

form. Then at night, cars

on the road keep me awake—

traffic sounds like waves.

No man is an is-

land; we are all islands, sur-

rounded by the sounds

of coming and go-

ing. Paying attention to

that is salvation.

Yellow leaves litter

the sidewalks but climate change

drives leaf peepers North

in search of color.

Maybe there maples catch fire

in season. What we

call ”fall color” is

a gift that opens our hearts—

pure, original!

I sit in the sun

inside the door. Autumn glare

makes blanks of us all.

I smile and greet them

anyway, coming in, go-

ing out. They smile back.

It’s that time of year.

One does not need religion

to feel connected.