Category Archives: Poems 2019

FOR ME

 

 

Naked girls reach for the light

                    downstream,
                    stage right,
                    day’s end:

with alabaster limbs washed
after a good rain, leaves
puddled in the shadows
at their feet as the sun sets
a little south of the western myth
and the three hundred pagan souls
that owned this canyon,

hills worn smooth—
centuries of cobbles seized
by knotted roots
chasing water
still claim the creek.

A battered jeep limps
home for repairs
down the road between us,
a day at play
in fresh mud and snow

and the girls keep dancing
unconcerned and unafraid

                    of time

                    for me.

 

WOLF MOON

 

 

She arrives quietly before dark night
like a lover returned
reminding how we fell

into one another’s eyes
to share the light—
to help me forget how

the planet spins with acrimony,
all the harsh words
under layers of lies

lost to her shadow cast
across the canyon—
she is a goddess rising.

 

STAPLES, POSTS AND WIRE

 

 

A long wire gate
in a steep spot
has heard replacement

swinging from pipe braces,
moving the fence,
for twenty-five years—

hears us laughing at the hole
it sometimes takes both to close—
about a list longer than our lifetimes.

On the slick hillside,
reminders realized, open
to pastoral light as I rejoice:

relieved from my word
to myself, to one another,
and to these staples, posts and wire.

 

BURNING BUSH

 

 

Prolonged moment before the all-day rain
quit, evening light pressed into the gray
reflects the mist within like a lantern glowing

separate from the sinking sun, blinding colors
rage around me, superfluous extremes burning
wildly with possibilities that beg me to yield,

to gratefully acquiesce and unfence my mind.
Rooted in a woodstove ash dump, heavy
with seed pods after twenty years—Redbud

in flames, tongues of fire hanging brightly
to taste the damp air fresh with a thousand
new beginnings we’ve yet to speak of.