Monthly Archives: December 2010

Thatched and lashed with horsehair
thread, even well-built nests
have casualties, tip in a storm,

spill family overboard, and we
remain to make repairs – find reason,
where so often there is none.

If we have love, we have no choice
but to fall with them, over and over
into the void – and we do it,

not to savor grief, but to collect
what parts we can, to piece our nest
back-together again.

                                            – for Alie and Jeff

We’ve come together this far –
the storm is done, but for the
leaking off hillsides, rivulets

turned clear in starlight
falling into a grumbling torrent,
cleaning house, reasserting

elbow room into the silt.
She is the last word, boss
in this canyon, come hell

or flood and we grin, admire
her spunk – not too old to buck
and run. Hope rides on gravity,

the equation of extremes
cut into this landscape
validated before us – and we pray

to all things wild for one last
tantrum, one last reason
to let her be before we go.

A prayer saved for those
subject to the senseless,
the unexplained, the never
            to be resolved pain
            that will shape them
with every throbbing ache
in this flesh – a prayer pulled
            from mountaintops
            surviving storms.

A prayer saved for the living
left to grieve the unexplored
alone to find themselves –
            yet never more
            the same.
A prayer saved for tenderness
and strength, for love and faith
            that will endure
            in time.

                                                                                    The dead,
                        too, denying their graves, haunt
                        the places they were known in and knew,
                        field and barn, riverbank and woods.
                                                – Wendell Berry (“2008, X.”)

Even now the headstones claim
little flats beneath nameless draws
either side of the house, rough

granite boulders set at the head
of deep holes filled for horse and dog –
where the deer lay down to shade

when I was a boy, and women healed
the spirit, burning sage, chanting
until they fell asleep. Hollow ground

to horses’ hooves where my children
played pretend, those great imaginings
that beg to fly – now walk their sons,

listening – feet wet in grass.
To come home for Christmas can be
a gift – so many voices welcoming.

It is time – you both have gone and left us
plenty to do and think about as we sit down
to Christmas for the last time in your house.

It looks just like you left it, yet not the same –
the world has changed and we have aged.
There is neither time nor money enough

to set the orchard right, not energy enough
to find new homes for what it’s raised, glowing
gold tonight in rows on trees, rinds puffed

and weakening. Remember when the crop
was picked and in the shed by Thanksgiving?
Your all-electric Medallion home with lots

of single panes, a dinosaur today with wheels
spinning, sitting empty without you, without
purpose for your dreams but to house memories.

Transplanted, it is time to let our old roots
go – turn away as new hands shape or desecrate
the honest living you built yourselves.

A box, a drawer – bundled letters stored
deep inside walls, now forgotten fade with
ledgers stacked in a leaky shed, stained

by dust and water. Whose time have we
stolen as this century accelerates, squeezes
into a decade? What next, a year or week?

Like pickup dogs, tears streak our cheeks –
we cannot look back like Lot’s unnamed wife
for fear of falling out, missing the next turn,

next bomb. Not quite Palmer, his hand
flowed legibly forward, innocently across
unlined sheet after sheet like furrows full

and level across vineyards at home, dutiful
son, stateside before the Bulge, before we
knew him, before his scraps of hieroglyphics

he could not improve. How hard the words
came: deep cut letters slurred together
we could not read and he could not say easily.