chester street

Mere chance put me there-
Rolling two-by-eights
Across the garage rafters
Framing a new roof:
When the pale November sun
Got low between the cedar branches,
And shot vivid rays
Through the pink cirrus
Overhead--
Enough to make a man
Catch his breath
       & pause for a moment
In the constant beauty of things.

renewal

On the backside of Harmony Ridge
Where the University
          has found old bones
A rain-mist ribbons through the cedars
Drifts toward the river...

left out

Lanterns hung
   big party next door-
      not invited this year

dawn

Aurora
  deftly
    shedding
      her satin
        night-robes

Vera, Lake

             Tomorrow has been cancelled.

             A swoop of woodsprites

             jabbers in the pine-tops

             above my little red cabin

             as the bath fills with hot water –

             silvery woods at dusk

             where all things meld

             into an indistinct soft repose,

             including me.

             For an hour that has no seams

             there will be no dreaded consequence

             no Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

             poised above my head,

             all sins forgiven

             all fears forgotten.

                                                  -1995

stridency

    

       What emerges in an engineering culture- like ours- is a reckoning of the human body as a source of necessity and discomfort, which it intends to meliorate with its many appliances.  And it is tireless: a dynamic that never envisions any notion of 'arrival,' enamored as it with new, updated, faster.

carney

County fair-
The balloon-seller drunk
By the blue ribbon goats

Wanda on the Trades

"Oh I know it well-
One week it's turkey,
The next week it's feathers"

2 AM

A beer & a shot
Two-out-of three
On Lew's warped pingpong table

Eating chocolate cake
On Tahoe's summer shore
Criticizing America...

high country

A full moon rises yellow
Over great tracts of tundra
Near the 80th parallel:
Six hundred miles to the Pole.
Under a glimmering borealis
A young grey wolf drinks from a divot
On the road once used
As a shortcut to Nootka