The way to stop dogs
barking on a moonlit night
is to throw a cloud
over the moon. That
said, we try to end poems
with clear images,
but clarity
exposes the unfinish-
able task. Embrace
chiaroscuro.
Flicker with the flickering.
Love your neighbor’s dog.
See Geoffrey Hill, “To John Constable” in CANAAN
High elevations
show diversities of grass.
Young, I filled pages
of sketches — severe,
tender, thin spindles of light.
Later at home I
turned to poetry.
Ezra Pound’s taxonomies!
Beyond that, haunted
by mountain grasses,
I see the light in poems
flood field after field.
Necessity’s hour —
loss of the sweet garden flat,
of the pleasure zones
in ear, eye, hand, tongue.
Suddenly you are out West
befriending local
crows. They follow you,
those eschata of old age,
your leading edge and
raucous joy in be-
coming. You can hear them o-
ver the Interstate.
Early on I saw
music was consuming me.
I gave my guitar —
itself a glowing
gift — to a friend, and turned my
self to words words words.
In retrospect, I
play these words on the guitar
I kept for myself.
I was very young
but Dante appealed to me.
The transhuman way
his Beatrice
spoke with him, her words — “telos,
seed and aim” — were not
only poetry,
they were about how poems
fulfill themselves in
the mind. That’s unchanged.
A poem’s activity
startles and consoles.
Even small poems
can teach lovers how to tell
silences apart.
Those punctuated
engage the lovers’ souls in
a subtle dance. Those
arising from space
formal and necessary
should give lovers pause.
In such white spaces
others appear unannounced.
They depend on where
the relationship
is headed. The language they
speak is difficult.
Is there a grammar
of grace? As a student I’d
sit on the crab grass
outside the schoolroom
and diagram Ancient Greek
syntax. It made sense
of prepositions
and verbs. Hot afternoons passed
as I lost myself
in the wonder of
it, this order emerging
like grace in grammar.
