The Trees From Which

Those trees from which
great violins were fashioned
made sounds like sighing.
Bold limbs
creaked and groaned,
urged by wind that spent
midnight
being musical.

This is not quite the same music
a cricket makes when it
rubs its legs together at evening,
arousing,
but you get the idea.

Perhaps Antonio Stradivari
heard a branch moan,
leaped from his bed, thought,
“That is my elusive tone!”
and ran to his copy-shop.

The cricket is an artist by nature,
just so Stradivari,
wind
and tree.
Sing your heart song,
I’ll offer one from me.

You Cannot Say Hoar Frost Anymore

Spring returns
to Thirsty Harbour,
whose thawing windows reveal slow
just how fast a once-trickle stream
flows, constant now,
without promise or flavour.

Mudded brown,
many mixed and broken things
swirl down
as watch then we old news,
the morning, the night,
each lighted bright and piled on
the noon.

Someone pulled a golden handle
marked ‘flush’
and our glorious days
by manufactured magic rush
to disappear.
Who knows when it happens,
perhaps sometime later this or
early next year?

At this poem’s beginning,
I realized our end is true,
you cannot say ‘Hoar
Frost’ anymore
without starting a war
about values

or meaning.

The Mountain Poem

The Mountain Poem
(march 17, 2023)

Today,
when I started,
I meant to walk
through the new mountains,
where sharp edges
thrust upward.
Always embarrassed at their nakedness,
the peaks have now slung hasty,
below the shoulder,
a soft garment of green
which teases another season to life.

It has been winter
and hibernation
for the longest time,
with everything visible disguised
by a transitory purity
that now blackens and shrinks
under sfumato’s cheerful blue sky,
beyond which,
sun is on fire.

All of this, I observe
and it pauses my forward motion
until yesterday’s hard things soften to a dream,
identify themselves as soft puffs above
that could be from Tecumseh’s,
or any other grandfather’s
pipe. Is this a signal?
Maybe the clouds warn the future,
before it arrives.

I am caught, as anyone or thing is,
in the hour of one moment
by a web impossible to comprehend,
an intricate net of fine strings
with no apparent source,
no purpose,
no end.

A Package Of Value

I put away dulled pencils,
and the grey
scribbling
that screamed back from
a near-empty
page.

Heeding the howling not,
I stepped back
for a moment
of what I claim is
air.

Habit drew me,
distracted, to the
kitchen,
to the stove
and to brief wisps
of a sick sweet smoke
that might provoke in others,
urgent need for caution.
Not me.
Thus, I grow fat
from simple constipation.

As I laboured at
the pots and pans,
smoke gathered to
a cloud,
collected until the neighbours
noticed.

Some folks name the billows
‘that big, black dog’
and I understand.
A woman I know
(who has handsome
children and a good-looking husband)
carries both fear of
and familiarity with
the dark beast
in her heart, too.
She speaks freely of
the black dog,
noting how often and when
this shadow creature
sneaks in.
Myself?
I never see anything
until there are real flames.

When folks nearby
began to offer grace,
this time,
I moved to a safer place,
shut down the cooking
and decided to
just
wait.

I know it is true,
sometimes,
for a package I might seek,
like the mail,
to be a
little bit
late.

The Guest May Never Know

Folks say that it was God,
Himself, who bent the sun
along it’s track,
sent the other stars
and planets
from or to then back.

A store-front preacher,
whom I know,
reads from a book
that’s very old,
breathes a quiet soliloquy.

The ancient tales
do comfort him and
I don’t flat-out
disagree, ‘cause
things more strange than
someone’s super powers,
science says, must be.

If Quarks with charm
don’t ring alarms,
then belief in God will certain not
do greater
intellectual harm.

Awareness stokes imagination.
“Where is it that I stand?
Out of whom or what
came my creation?
In which land
is ultimate my destination?”

All tall stories
told to me
argue what proof’s eye can’t see,

that while alive, the guest
may never know,
exact,
how universes grow.

The Clock Alone Has Time

Time,
the shining mother ship,
transports our trusting souls,
aloft, a-sail,
across the dome of space.

Wind and circumstance,
by strong or gentle motion,
bend what they are passing,
so can time be proven.
(A thing was here that now
is there. I am bald
who once had hair.)

Contrariwise,
I true believe,
we never leave the moment.
There is no was and
will no future
certain be,
though ebb and
flood, growth and death,
dream and memory
might
disagree.

The Proof

Suppose it true,
our solitary home a spinning rock,
flung across entirety
at fantastic speed.

I can almost feel the
wind of it,
loose hair much like
a comet-tail of frozen bits
as time
and every precious minute lived,
flows out behind.

This is a dazzling idea,
where
God and love and
power and fortune,
win and lose and
mighty oceans,
taxes and war and
constitutions
mean
nothing.
The proof of paradise
is imagination.

The Invention of Plastic/Sleeping In

I’ll bet
cave men caught
forty more winks
at the end of a night.
Og may have said,
as, at this moment, I yet might,
“Hell with it, today!”
since the breakfast fire
was a bitch to
light.

In cave days,
folks had basic hurdles
and nothing more to do
than eat or make love
and sleep until the sleeping
was through.
In this day,
with complex social machinery,
we make great 
hullabaloo
of ancient need or longings;
reproduction,
food and 
shelter, too.

Within our time,
we built good walls
around what was found
and free,
embellishing the easy
with modern and enlightened
filigree.
Life
got wrapped in plastic,
seems to me.

We orchestrate
and delegate,
designing work to do
and ‘He who lies abed,
does not move the world ahead’
rings true
but is there a
more important place
for me to be moving to?

Let me roll over
and curse me not,
at the moment, 
I’m
in a nice, warm,
pleasant sort of 
spot.

©  16 mins ago   humor • nature • philosophy   

At The Deaths of Two Children

At The Deaths of Two Children

During a haunted day,
heavy grey sketched shadow corners
onto a kitchen scene complete,
where home’s Formica table,
stood as balance point surrounded.

On the sideboard,
a wooden spoon dripped slow,
resting, it’s brief battle done.
The smallest voices echoed
somewhere off, among
much
richer
flowers.

Shoulder to shoulder they sat,
deep sorrow creasing more the brow
of these familiar witnesses,
whose empty hands held coffee mugs
as anchor.
A newbie stumbled in,
head and heart at full spin.

“Oh, sweetie…”,
sang in sotto voce.
Summer froze
and everything burst together.