Write your poem — she told me –
not about a snow storm
but rather a snow flake.
That is how she came to me,
not with blizz and bluster,
fizz and fluster, but soft
and Seleney, floaty, flirty,
melt on my shirty,
crystallined, one of a kind.
Archive for fall
Snowflake
Burned out
I watched the sunrise flare pink orange this morning
like a wildfire over Dodgeville, a conflagration, an inferno,
a holocaust, and wondered what meaning I would attach
as poets do when they find a small platform to stand on,
a place from which to jump into the flames and be consumed.
I see now, fall turning to winter, of course, for the lesson
of the season is that all things good and beautiful die
before we are ready. We all know the seasons turn,
that life is a wheel, that spring will blossom some day.
But will we be the same tomorrow as we were yesterday,
singed by such flames, the acrid smell of flesh and hair
hanging between us? This is the question that hovers
like a cloud of black smoke, like fine gray ash floating
Earthward, that has the power to sting and choke
in memory after it has dissipated from sight.
November Night
Sunset flaring
cold fire orange
on the beaver pond.
How fast the glow fades,
blackness bleeding
to the world’s sharp rim.
Hold still, listen for
the murmuring voices of starlight
beneath the night’s immaculate silence
and the tiny pings
more felt than heard
as meteors bearing
indecipherable messages from alien gods
streak the periphery,
the blurry caul
where the you
becomes the
whatever lies beyond.
Every Falling Leaf
I worry about the birds — these birds,
singing here in this tree, whose names
I do not know, who best, I think, be
heading south — and all the children
of all the friends I have known and forgotten,
in cars on dark, curvy roads. Where
could they be going on a night like this?
The sky is too wide, the forest too deep
to fret for every falling leaf. For this,
men invent gods, multitudes of them.
They watch over fish and fowl,
beast and man who creates them
in the image to which he aspires —
all knowing and all seeing.
I see the skunk — that one
dashing across the big curve
between South Range and Trimountain —
sleek, beautiful, head down, tail flying,
a black and white banner of night.
Take care, fellow traveler, you and I
have little ones waiting at home.
After a Hot September, Rain
After a hot September, rain,
relentless and wind-whipped,
scoured the summer-scuffed
surfaces of this postglacial
northwoods world, settled
the dust and wetted the sand,
made lie down gentle the ferns
brown and brittle with fall,
and glistened on sumac and
maples red raging against
the dying of the light. Now
the chill I feel is not from wet
and cold, but from the year’s
descent, with the flagging sun,
into a quiet, snow-muffled time
come soon when men too
lie quiet and wait for one
who is not there, and one
more summer should there be.
