Half moon rising in the night
Its dark side does not shine
Sometimes I feel just half a man
Who cannot make you mine.

The half that glows in yellow light
Reflected from the sun
Is like my face alighted by
The gaze of my loved one.

The half that hangs so dark and still
Against the starry field
Is like my tortured soul whose pain
In absence is revealed.

To whom can I give thanks
for this perfect day, when
I do not know my Creator’s name?

To the red pines we planted,
for blocking the northwest wind;

To the russet oak leaves,
for cushioning my steps on the trail;

To the soil and seeds and fruit of the garden,
for nourishing my body;

To the hens for sharing their eggs,
and the roosters for watching over them;

To my family for standing with me,
like the pines;

To my friends for adding color and comfort to my life,
like the leaves;

To my own mind for when it’s fertile and productive,
like the garden;

And to my readers for sharing themselves
and crowing their kee-kee-ree-kee praises.

May we all rest tonight, and open ourselves
tomorrow to receive the day’s blessings,
from whence they came I know not. Amen!

The white horse is in the yard again.
Not a ghostly white apparition, no
apocalyptic steed, just the neighbor’s
dusty old gelding, a solid muscularity
of grass-eating purpose, neck and chest
and haunches heavy on spindly legs
like an inverted pyramid, tearing
clumps of grass with a rip-chew-breathe
like an army of leaf-cutter ants in a
microphone forest.
                                 My mood
is not dull like the old horse’s coat,
it is shiny black, iridescent, a raven 
in a blizzard on a Mountain Ash,
gulping the last red berries.
I grind the beans to a fine powder.
The fragrance of coffee floods the room,
a hurricane, a tsunami, first breaking wave
of another black and white day shading to gray.

I lost a gold ring
one rare snowy day
when we lived on Merriwood Ct.

It must have slipped
off my cold right ring finger
when I threw a snowball
and my slush-soaked mitten flew too.

The neighbor lady found it,
to our surprise, next spring in the lawn.

Love can be this way.

You can lose it
when you are tossing things,
when the world’s too cold.

You become accustomed
to its absence, stop feeling for it
with your thumb.

One day, it may turn up
where you least expect,
amid a scattering of dandelions
in the season’s warm rain.

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.

Oh, America, you big stupid brute, I love
your huevos rancheros and black coffee,
the way you dance on Saturday night,
your Southern accent and blue denim,
soft magnolia breeze and white-washed
clapboard churches. You are my neighbor,
my old girlfriend, my old demented uncle
who makes me turn away in shame from
such crazy talk, so much blood spilled,
wiped on your shirt. Isn’t it about time
you grew up and opened your heart to love?

Jasper Johns, "Green Flag"

The dogs and I venture into an alien landscape,
Lapland, Siberia, the Martian surface, new snow
like frozen ashes, like dead skin flaking from
the god of all things too cold and forbidding.

Those twenty centuries passed in the shtetls
on the Russian steppes, in the ghettos of Krakow,
Smolensk, L’vav, were nary enough time to
accustom my blood to the profound absence of light.

I crave sunshine, orange juice, olive groves, warm
sand and blue water, and the company of dark-
complected souls who collect the sun’s rays
and reflect them in warm and lively conversation.

On this third day of November, when my world
has turned from green to white, all color drained
like blood from a corpse, I feel like a car spinning
on an icy grade, or skidding toward the ditch.

American movies, double feature,
Talking Heads and Laurie Anderson,
in Sesto San Giovanni, the night before
we flew to Barcelona.  You laid your head
upon my shoulder and purred softly to sleep.

Walking back to the little hotel,
you took my hand and leaned in close.
But you had a husband at home
and an Italian boyfriend, too, and
anyway we had that early flight to catch.

Next morning, over strong black coffee
and hard rolls dry, I wondered in silence
about your tall and eager body, a mystery
unresolved, and every place I had never been
and all their varied customs.

The poet is a butcher
who flays the wild beast
and peels back the dusty hide
to reveal muscle and bone
and the heart that once beat beneath.

There is skill and art
in the way he carves the meat,
trims the fat, exposes the grain
of truth in the tender, succulent
morsels that nourish.

The poet is a diver
who plumbs the depths for pearls,
milky tears shed into the sea
by a god who could not bear
a beauty too fine and rare.

The strand of shining moons
that light her night-clad breast,
and the blood-red steak
on bone-white china,
remind the poet of what comes next.

I am a dull-edged blade
sawing through the day’s tough hide.

A swift and terrible slashing is best
when the thickly callused surfaces

will not yield to the first tentative stabs.
Now the pink flesh gives way under

my insistent pressure, the bone
a hard gray stela where I make my mark.

The dogs can suck the marrow.
Blood is my ablution, and pain

is the whetstone with which
I sharpen myself for the next beast.