Poetry and About Poetry

Filing Papers in December Walls creak at night, talking to one another in the voices of those who've lived here. That same wind bends around the same corner of the building, howling something about night shadows, pitch-crazy in the back and forth light of green streetlights swaying. And I have no hands for it all. My fingers ache from empty grabs at empty places where a voice had seemed flesh enough to touch. Walls just go on cracking. Even in the corner, wrapped in an old man's blanket, laying out dead years in pages of a manuscript blown into disorder by the furnace wind from the rushing duct, even in the grey shelves where I lay my eyes out evenly, even in the cold-sheeted barebed, ghosts of all the brave days dance. No; don't let the brain go hot. They're just green shadows from dancing streetlights gliding through streaked windows. Just walls creaking cold. Just a wind, not a spirit, answering its own not-call, while the furnace in imitation rushes warmth to a cold...

Oregon, 1972 Tall pines, bed needles beneath, ash below the rock precipice: He has come to an end of denials, and flows with the cold stream of melting ice. He cuts deep with the rivulets. He molds crevices in mud. He tears with the falling water and leaps rapids of rock and time and dives for the valley. Surrounded there by sorties of mosquitoes, water wrigglings of snakes, he drifts thru the swamps to waterfall, and midair dances. He becomes mist He powers the small generators. He runs to the city and becomes a lake, upholds the children swimming, and the sailboats highing to the wind, and he reflects fireworks by night. He sleeps there one night awaiting the change to peacefulness and deep moving. Original version published in The Free Lance (1978

Drifts Becalmed in springtime, tides out, sandbars in, and lost from it all. The scent of coming summer touches, then blows away. But even summer comes down to thunderheads and long days and the humid heat of Michigan. Out on the lake some sailboat drifts, having lost it all, upside down: In remembrance of snowdrifts, other white sails in wet undulations. And someone yells, and starts the dream again. Published in Stone Country (1985)

Back to the River Back to the river, though the time is cold, the night old, but clear, the wind making waves that speak darkly shore to shore. Back to the river, sit beside a smoky fire, eat roast corn, blackened potatoes. Watch my insubstantial shadow flicker ephemerally in the tall trees. Black waves of the river break across the rocks, make music with the shore. The winds that brought the waves are done. Sit in cool grass with river waves behind, with the orange heat of the snapping fire in my face, on my arms. Wait out each wave for the one that turns a morning free, and me back to the river. Published in Ripples (1985)