Before Dark, and After
A Collection of Poems
by
Bernard Fancher
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 by Bernard Fancher
All rights reserved
This ebook is licensed and distributed by Smashwords, and may not otherwise be disseminated without the author’s permission.
***
Table of Contents
In Praise of Existential Awareness
Between the Lightning and the Lightning Bug
Our Walk, First Thing this Morning
***
Beneath the tree where the young buck nuzzled
The ground picking green acorns out of dried leaves,
I sat in the half tire swing only moments away
From learning this place was mine, a few feet
Away from where the young deer years later stood
Entirely unaware of my ghost presence, close enough
To reach out and, if not touch, at least scare him;
I stand in the open doorway at the front of the house
In midwinter now, considering the doe
That stood entranced before my first fire, wondering
If she might be the granddame of the young buck
Come back years later like an homage, or echo.
Something always antedates something else,
Making memory or imagination or pure dreaming
The stuff of stories and poems and plays;
From the center of this same tree
Thoughts tossed blithely off return. I embrace
Them below an arc of limbs, rooted to this place.
***
First Light
What makes me think to go again
to where the field bends back from the sky—
perhaps to recover a lost conceit of myself
as a modern-day Ponce de León
visiting some part of the world for the first time?
Ten years on, a red fox lies perfectly still on its side
as if sleeping sound in the hay. The dogs rush ahead
remembering the ridge-top chance meeting with a tom
turkey coming, some years ago, the opposite way.
Shouldn’t they anticipate such a meeting again?
Admitting life is a mystery, what is to be lost
in the expectation of reliving past experience?
After a moment’s further reflection I suppose
that’s unrealistic, and instead of permitting their untamed pursuit
of presentiment, I call them back, kneeling to pet them
and so preserve the vital element of our surprise.
I remember the herd of deer discovered a dozen years ago now
gathered at first light round the still-hidden sump of a spring,
and rising, proceed slowly, consciously keeping
the dogs at my heel, climbing to what seems the top of the known world—
there to observe, just below us, the startled ghosts
of those same deer, standing still, all but frozen.
I clap my hands, once, and they disappear.
***
Fleeing
the deer flicker through trees
reversing the process of transubstantiation
going from here to gone.
Beau is halfway across the field before I see him
hell-bent to follow
shadow into darkness
becoming shadow himself
disappearing.
***
Storm Warning
These insubstantial snowflakes drifting on air
may or may not be the precursor of heavier snow.
All ready
I envision the fields full, the electric lines
laden, the tall narrow trees lining the woods
themselves lined
standing like impassive dark sentries,
the lengths of their windward sides exposed,
plastered white.
I see myself on skis first time all winter,
the dogs plowing ahead, breaking trail
on an old logging road
until in one place we step aside and listen to nothing,
hearing in stealth a silence more meaningful
than words.
I detect the dogs’ panting, my own dissipating breaths.
From a void evolves a lone squirrel’s incessant
soft clucking.
Under all, the howl of wind imposes its presence,
approaching unseen, making ready, biding its own
unmeasured time.
***
Dare
Fire deflects off shear rock
behind where I stand
before the open beyond.
Like water,
sparks fall from the precipice
or float drifting off to the sky.
By and by, I turn away
not to burn
or to drown
but to quietly sleep
in a soft crevice
of warm stone and low flame,
only dreaming a dream
of what I might do.
***
Walking the Dog
An old apple tree
is as good a place to rest
as any, its fruit
being fertile ground.
This spring,
as sap stirs
dead wood to life,
I feel only a loss
of feeling for the world.
While Macduff sniffs,
I consider Adam’s fortune
to have had God
out looking for him
rather than the other way
around. Yet, I think,
we are still caretakers
and move on, checking
empty bird boxes, prudently
tapping them first
before peering inside.
At the end of the line
leaning on a fencepost
beside a green pasture
I imagine how it would be
to live here,
but my mind is already home
so I turn, and Duff leads,
happy to know the way.
***
Arid Dream
What strange bird flies
circling the dark void of the back field?
Hemmed by woods on three sides,
compelled to revolve a black hole
in the landscape, it utters by turns
a plaintive, solitary Gaaack,
seeming to count the completion of each circle
before lapsing again into silence.
I imagine a lost seabird, maybe an albatross
(whose young lie somewhere dead, filled to bursting
with plastic scavenged doodads)
searching for its mate, perhaps thinking,
birdlike, the dark plain beneath its wings a safe harbor
it dare not touch for fear of disturbing
the dream it skirts yet distrusts to settle upon;
so continually it circles a vast field of night—
nearly frantic, it seems, and inconsolable—
waiting to hear a reply forever lodged in my throat.
***
You discover yourself
risen from snow, floating
like a wisp of mist
levitating in cold moonlight
borne aloft,
propelled by disassociation,
floating diagonally
above wire-enclosed fields
barbed with the subliminal threat
of capture.
But not even trees
in the woods impede entrance, rather
your wraith presence opens
and closes around them,
and so you pass through
a dreamt realm of your own being,
being what you dream
and dream to become.
***
Felicity
If my love lies, then she does flatter me,
Coaxing my doubt towards certainty;
But though words are said in seeming truth,
Of her real intent I have no proof.
I wish only to see her emerald eyes,
And be assured her smile conveys no compromise.
Instead, awake, I listen through the night
To her words’ artful echo, for if they be right
Then I most surely must be wrong to doubt her love:
She is far more fair and pure than I could prove.
But if they be false, then so is she,
Yet gladly would I lie with her, in complicity.
5/4 2002
***
A Field Guide to the Birds
Scarlet tanager, indigo bunting,
green heron.
The words are jewels
to the mind, illuminating something elusive.
A cardinal steps about on a sleeping lilac
draped with Virginia creeper.
Snow lies deep in the yard, a little early for bluebirds.
I look to the dead limb stretched above the kitchen sink window,
seeing not even a flicker
of pileated woodpecker in the still embalmed trees.
An old Peterson’s field guide
reveals the persistence of desire (or obsession) for knowing
what’s what.
Is that a bob-white or bobolink
imprinted on the curled green cloth cover?
Never mind, I remind myself, recognizing it for the guide
it is, realizing everything we know belongs to chance, opportunity
and change.
***
Fox Grapes
As I go about the task of eliminating weeds from the garden,
vines like brown ropes secured to the ground
cover the condensery across the road from the barn;
they covertly make ready to issue forth green tentacles of new growth
that will curl inevitably about every part of a place I’ve given up on.
It is nearly time to till, and yet still I work on hands and knees
breaking down brittle stems of dead burdocks,
collecting their clinging and yet dispersing seed balls
in a determined attempt to stave off the next generation.
Only mid-April, but already too warm for the dogs
who lie raspily breathing in the pussy willow’s indeterminate shadow,
the weather has gone in one day from chill to prematurely subtropical.
I reach over the dog lying nearest to me,
allowing my forearm to brush his fur coat. Allowing it too,
he merely stretches a hind leg, opening and again immediately closing
his eyes. A stick-tight has grabbed hold of my skin,
clinging like a disembodied pincer, not wanting to let go.
Isn’t that the way of us all?
I ask myself the question in all sincerity, knowing
I am blessed. Looking up to see the wind pushing clouds,
I vocalize contentment and pleasure at once, practicing a frugal austerity.
I tell myself and the dogs: Even here, with each thing, we must decide
what to keep and what to discard.
***
Feeding Horses
After feeding the pigs,
and stopping by Mura’s for hay,
we watched the sun
set as we rode the dirt road home.
Racing darkness,
we threw bales from the pickup,
heaving them to your horses
while through the paddock door
I watched Fox Hill bathed in twilight
and imagined a fox
skirting the delineation of efflorescent field
and wood, hunting something.
If such interludes comprise eternity,
were we to live forever,
I could not ever be happier.
Yet I suspect the best we can hope
is to live as we can
until the only thing left is to die.
When that time comes
I want to be the first to go.
But if I am left,
leave me at least the image of you
standing, enclosed by a barn
open to the world, flinging hay to your horses,
chaff and hair flying, wild with wind.
***
In Praise of Existential Awareness
The rhubarb is in a state of wrinkled emergence
behind the barn and tilled garden.
A few days ago, I picked a single asparagus spear
and laid it down in the grass, for later.
This morning, I heard the happy chortling of a house wren
for the first time since late last summer.
Bees buzz within a cloud of cherry tree blossoms
in the front yard.
The bluebirds are already prolific; a clutch of four
sky blue eggs nestle deep in a cup of dead grass
behind the slanting door of the nest-box out back.
Meanwhile, a vine and weed and paper trash fire
smolders unattended in the half dug gravel pit,
sending a blue acrid plume drifting up
from behind the low north-side slope East of here.
Not that it matters. Or maybe it does.
I seem to recall the Buddha’s teaching:
everything exists behind or beyond or below something else,
and so wait for all to be revealed, at the world’s infinite leisure.
***
Full Moon Fever
Driving at dusk
out of Albany light
and dust, I pass by Crescent
and Half Moon, yearning
for backcountry.
Somewhere off a railroad
cul de sac
under a hillside of yuppie horse farms
in infringing darkness
I park along a solitary track
and walk up through a wildflower field
soaked with starlight
under a floating full moon
rising alone among transparent
cirrus, composing
in my circular head this incipient poem
for you my sleeping love
three hundred miles away.
***
Between the Lightning and the Lightning Bug
The difference between the right word and the almost right word
is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.
—Mark Twain
I perceive it before becoming entirely awake
as it bounds against the canopy, let in by a window
to flash repeatedly across the cathedral ceiling
in an apparent effort to get back out.
Each time it ignites—so successfully disguising itself
as something animate
that I wish to rise and go as well
into the outer darkness—the conviction reforms
and re-establishes the idea my mind has lit upon,
imagining a rare display of Northern Lights descending
over our lower latitude, to grace all who would see.
Thus I am enticed and ready to embrace possibility
as I exit the back door, feeling inside
attuned to the pulse of an unworldly presence.
I don’t expect God, at least not to reveal himself so blatantly,
so am not disappointed to find an aurora of restrained lightning
bucking up against clouds
lying barely an inch or two above the polar horizon.
Once, long ago, riding down an unlit back road
I encountered that very same light in miniature
where a solitary firefly
pulsing below the leaves of a low hanging branch
illuminated its place in the surrounding darkness.
Perceiving a wonderful thing then, I decide now again
to wait and watch in amazement.
***
Clumped snow
streaks the window view.
The sky is gray.
Near trees stand dark
against the midrange horizon.
The falling/fallen snow
merging with dusky woods
in an indefinable distance
of hills somewhere across the creek
becomes zone by imperceptible zone
the value of pure night.
***
The beasts of the field are still
in their stillness. They sleep
under the thin rim of a moon,
breathing air cooled in the hills
and thin rills of dim meadows
where far distant barn windows
cast pinpricks of light across a dark valley.
Field mice and moles
hid in the nearby ravened wood
lie safe from both hovering falcon
and more decisive horned owl
which, yet being beings, are still beasts, after all.
Shall we count the spotted fawn
lying ensconced in the grass?
What of the missing doe mother?
Is ‘beast’ a damning or exculpatory word?
Perhaps ‘fox’ describes
the intention of thought more precisely,
its already shifting presence conforming to intractable space
at once both above and under a log.
Just yesterday, I found seven hairless infant
rabbits, a half dozen which fit securely
side by side in the palm of one hand.
I wish to believe they lie still
safely composed where I left them,
tucked in a furry burrow
under a bleached, split-locust fence post.
Maybe fox, coyote, or bear
deserve praise after all for conforming
our vague impressions to imprecise, prancing shadows.
In moonlight, for moons and moons
yet to come, they will persist, contained in a memory—
roused from slumber, awakened, yet carried on in a dream
of dreaming.
***
Return
It is not barking dogs I hear
but geese angling for home,
flying so far overhead
they appear as dots
in daylight.
At night, flying blind,
their soundings alone
maintain the formation,
assuring each a place in the whole,
assuring me too.
***
Curvature
A glacier
peels from the eaves
into watery windows.
Dripping sun melts what’s left.
If I look
I can see a robin’s eggshell
cracked by contrails.
Stars everywhere
reveal mostly the general homogeneity
of the universe, yet individuals
and constellations attest
to the stubborn persistence
of difference.
The Congresswoman’s slope
of recovery remains steep;
Egyptian skulls remain also at risk.
The revolution has come,
but where will it go?
Today is warm,
relatively; whenever ice falls
my skittish dogs jump.
(The photo experiment
interrupted by war to end war
shows inconstant starlight
bent towards an eclipsed sun—
now imagine
if the light couldn’t escape.)
Last night
I stood in the north doorway
looking out;
an encompassing darkness (outlining the arc
of an event horizon)
enclosed an unending Abyss
and stars in the trees.
A single star
fell through the branches—so quickly
I could barely breathe.
***
Getting In Coal
The shovel scrapes metal
to cement, scooping frosted nuggets
diamond hard in subzero air. Inside,
a fire already glows, warming the house.
I fill two buckets and stand
for a moment still as water
frozen across a pond. My breath
leaves me, clings briefly to the air
and disappears.
A tip for those who do not know:
the trick is to be in no hurry.
Coal is ice to a fire.
Poured too quickly it crackles and sizzles,
quenching the coals beneath. The trick
is to go slowly, build
on what is, like love. Be patient.
Don’t expect everything at once.
Time is on your side.
Etcetera.
I think back on my life,
girls I have known, have almost known.
My heart this morning is hard
as diamond, black as coal, cold
as ice. Yet the skin enclosing is sensitive and thin.
Another breath leaves me, clings
a moment to the frozen air.
I stomp my feet, lift two buckets
of frozen heat, and head in.
***
Northern Night
Last night the Aurora Borealis tinted the sky
with cool firelight, so tonight
I am hoping to see what I missed.
The moon, rising, is but a fingernail clipping
carrying an empty placenta elucidated by darkness.
I will walk around, go home,
perhaps even go out again up the hill before light
to stand alone in the field
where my brothers and I once powdered clay pigeons
or missed, pausing just long enough after
to hear the shot spray like hail in the woods.
***
Once on a Blue Moon
Full moonlight
reveals thin lines
of trees on blue snow.
My cat sits
on the couch
at the window,
a silhouette blacker
than all outdoors.
The coal fire at my back
makes a blue flame
licking the interstices
of feeling,
but I am neither desirous
nor disheartened
knowing I am an interval
too, by turns warm
or cold, light
or shadow.
***
Moment
Deer meet
in deep woods, content
to mingle idly and ruminate
while the world fills with snow.
Brittle as rice paper,
leaves quiver on an oak tree
overhead. The deer
scratch a fragile surface, revealing
mast and lacelike leaves
not yet quite decomposed.
Purposeful, intent,
mindful of someone’s shooting
far ahead,
they pause to look up, mouths agape,
and taste the bitter air.
***
Our Walk, First Thing This Morning
We turn off the road
and go down into the field
where deer have imprinted the ground;
I feel their presence to the right,
hear the soft sibilance of hide and stiff hair
before I see them: sleek bodies, dark and half formless,
slicing through still frozen goldenrod.
Beau sees them then too, and disappears into the hillside
before I can call him back, but soon returns
to lead us again across the high ridge towards home.
I see at last a funneling grapevine
grown into dead shadow on the shed roof behind the high barn
and then the fox, standing sideways, looking startled,
a hundred paces straight ahead.
The dogs, making chase, conform to a line of three
leaving, one after the other, in ascending order of speed.
Leaving as well, last and most slowly, I follow.
***
Parting
At the first concert we smiled to each other
and though I did not think of love,
I thought of you after. Later, in the market,
we met again, and again you asked me my age
and told me your name, beginning
my puzzlement and embarrassment.
The night following a movie I wanted to kiss you
you shyly giggled, so we parted
shaking hands instead. When I arrived the next day
on your threshold, you closed your door, asking I not linger
to listen while you practiced your violin.
Now it seems we have been parting ever since.
After our last concert we stood in the spring snow;
I watched your hair fill up with stars
and desired you stay, later regretting
I did not tell you before you decided to go.
In the days to come you will travel far from here.
I will envision you among cherry blossoms
on the Potomac, or walking in New York City.
You say you have not made up your mind
but I know you have, so even though I search all of China
I’ll likely not see you again.
***
Aftermath
The time will come
to step through the snow
going the way of the fields
and woods.
The dogs will plow
furrows to walk in
or walk behind me in mine.
Pine branches
touching the ground
might spontaneously spring
free, or be actuated
by the movements of perched crows,
all the while in stillness
for miles around
I’ll detect not a whiff
of the wind prying tonight
at the eaves.
***
Snow Moon
Printing herringbones, I traced
our halting half-steps up through trees
and stopped where they stopped in open snow
to look afield and review the far wood
cut by the clean curve of a meadow
where, in a perfect world, either of us might build
a home, raise crops, chickens, a family.
Though I had come to see the hunger moon
and to see in the blown snow
some evidence of our passing, I found
no sign of the moon, or of our selves.
On the far side of the wood
I put aside thoughts of life’s temporality
and left my mark as best I could,
etching the snow with a memory
of the pure meadow line to my rear
before turning for town, stopping once
to watch the whole moon emerge from a field
lined with row upon row
of perfectly rendered, perfectly concentric
corn stubble.
***
The Leonid Meteor Shower
The sky is streaked
as in a Japanese print, raining meteors
over the prow of the barn.
Breathless, I press my nose to the kitchen window,
fogging cold glass.
A moment ago, dizzy, with the top of my head
open to the infinite vacuum above,
all I could think of was getting inside.
Now I wish I had persevered, for comfort
seems every bit the barrier to perception as observing.
Still, if Heisenberg were here to see these flitting flameouts,
to revel in each chance commingling of potential and destiny,
even he would witness with perfect clarity and wonder:
What took eons to arrange finishes in a flash.
***
Shy of Heaven
We do not commonly talk
of animals being,
not as in humans being,
or more than seldom consider
the flicker of awareness behind the eyes of a dog,
even a beloved pet,
as anything other than contentment
or appreciation of our being with them
in an ever-fleeting present.
Accepting it as a gift, their being
allows us to view our surroundings
as intimates;
the world becomes what we see in their eyes.
A leaf falls, a squirrel flips
through a canopy of trees;
we look up in rapt attention and wonder
with sudden, considerable desire.
So being, we become more than before,
still animal, yet more—
considering the chance a squirrel
might fall, but wanting to see it also continue
leaping branch to branch to branch.
***
Tenuousness
i
Maybe
Our being is too largely illusive;
I edge to the gorge
And even then the rocks seem unreal.
Still I feel the pull of your hand
In mine
As you reach for the abyss
To pluck asters from the shale wall.
This morning the dogs and I walked in the woods.
I thought of you only
After hearing two raucous crows
Reconnoitering above. One,
Then another, still in my memory,
Skim the bare treetops,
Becoming again equal parts sky
And fog.
ii
From the gorge’s edge
The rocks below seem inviting and unreal. Still
I shudder, remembering
Your hand in mine.
I took the dogs for a walk in a misting wood.
Watching two crows skim the bare treetops,
I thought of you.
iii
Belatedly it occurs to me
The rocks seem unreal.
I overlook the gorge
As if to attempt faith
Only to recoil again from the pull
Of what argues against me.
I think of you holding my hand,
Reaching into the abyss
To pick asters from the shale wall.
iv
This morning I took the dogs for a walk.
I thought of you all the while.
Above us the raucous krruck krruck
Of two crows skimming bare treetops kept coming
Then going across an unseen, fogged-over sky.
Until their voices disappeared too.
***
Riding Blind At Night
I stay to the road by tilting my head back,
following a course revealed as though reflected
in the pale river of sky narrowly wending above this dug way.
The analog signal transmitted from fork to fingers
picked up and transferred by the front tire’s uncertain contact
with earth, allows me to feel the unseen pressed surface
hemmed in by ditches, steep banks, and overarching treetops
constricting light from the stars to a trickle.
The transition from night to pure dark makes me think
this place is a very Valley-of-Death cut into the bulk of a hill
where all manner of beast—bobcat and bear
and who knows what else—lie lurking, waiting to pounce.
And yet, apprehension turns to mild bemusement
as halfway up the hill some insubstantial critter approaches from behind
and attaches its presence to mine like a sidecar, pacing doggedly
with a multiplicative badgering patter of tiny fast feet
while I continue to churn the crank slowly
round and round, pulling so hard on the handles it is a wonder
the bicycle does not perform a back flip revolving about me
on its own as I strain to climb the steep grade.
Ever gradually, the summit gives up the advantage
and I outrace my companion to where earth and tree shadows fall away, yielding sky
and level high ground.
At last, I stand on the pedals and coast, transecting
cool hayfields, breathing thin air infused with the scent of cut grass.
Rolling towards a still undefined distance, I imagine deer in the impervious darkness
lifting their heads, curiously watching what must surely appear to them
a mere apparition of some strange, gliding beast.
***
Three Crows
On stiff stick legs
the first walks across the yard;
the second flies to the shagbark and lights
on a high hanging crooked branch;
the third, perched in a sumac
between lawn and back field,
finally launches on a single strong wing-beat,
landing with a sideways fanning flourish
amid scattering jays, squirrels,
broken nutshells.
As they regroup,
the squirrels and jays
seem somehow less than the blackness of crows—
blotting patches of green grass and snow,
making silhouettes suggestive of nothing else
but what exists, for a time, where it will.
***
I Went for a Walk
I went for a walk with the dogs
along the path at the edge of the field
looking out over the winding road
with the wind at my back before turning,
shouldering into the breeze to check on a nest-box,
lifting the slanted front to inspect for fresh interest inside.
I pull a length of old web from the oblong entrance hole
before closing the front down again, walking backwards
along a broken fence-line to appraise the far hills across the valley,
turning about in time to see Beau running, whipping
about like a limber whippet turning
on the same reversing bend taken two seconds before by the fox
he pursues, now as I, entranced by the fluid arc
of their twined horizontal tumbling/thrashing through weeds,
prolonging the moment of engagement before the fox turned away.
And here I laugh, left wondering where that fox is going,
taking both my dogs along for the exercise.
I imagine them escaped to untamed fields and woods
where in body and mind I not as certainly follow, stepping carefully
to avoid trampling May apples
going down a steep sloping bank to a muddy bottom
where imprinted paw-prints climb inexorably on
to the next hayfield, leading nowhere.
Now here, I remember the sudden near orchard whiteness
while still admiring the Indian blush of a far hillside
and turning again, a last time towards home,
discover bitten rhubarb amid a patch of shiny grass in the back yard
where the wind stroked it down.
A spruce tree standing just inside the profuse and imperfectly kempt lawn
sprouts small purple seed cones, which I move closer to see
(as well note) with an innocent intention to catalogue all
for sometime further on.
***
Midnight on Moss Lake
A scream pierced the quiet.
The moon lay flat on the sky, flatter still
on the calm water below.
Two boys camping where prohibited
built no fire, fearing discovery if not flames
in the tinder-dry needles and grass.
The scream came from a woman being murdered,
or a bobcat prowling not too far away,
each possibility a delicious affirmation of a reason to fear.
Years later, I took a young woman to the same place
to see the same moon reflecting just as flat on the water.
I related the tale of the lake as we walked
down the boardwalk, supported on a floating peat
mattress of pitcher plants, marsh marigolds, sticky sundew
and wild cranberries, both living and gone—a world decomposing
below our feet, drowning in a mire of all; eventually,
I whispered, only the bog would remain, enclosing entirely
the water’s shrinking edge. Already elsewhere
poplars grew in the sedge as though planted on solid ground.
We stopped. The still water waited as ever,
dark and depthless. No-one knew we were there—
making believable the suggestion I could
slit her belly, send her buoyant-less body sliding
off the end of the boardwalk
into a glacial pool legend claims has no bottom;
she might not resurface for five thousand years.
I would throw out the knife, hear it splash in the dark,
and that would be the end of her.
The moon reflecting in her eyes mirrored the possibility
as I tightened my grip, refusing to let go.
***
Going Home
What waits beyond
the hill in the entire
unlit land of open fields
and dark woods
is nothing other than
a place to come home to.
Deer stand frozen
alongside the road,
eyes liquid green
before the car’s passing.
The fields absorb starlight
as the woods absorb the fields,
while just beyond the far window
a light warms my door.
***
Before Dark
The moment fire took hold
the doe stopped dead in the drive
as flame turned to gold
consuming debris in her path.
She could not have foreseen
(despite tracing my prints from the road)
someone coming between
herself and this place.
Tail flicking, reluctant to pass,
she yearned to reclaim what was hers—
a last impression in grass
now filled like a grave in the snow.
I watched her watching fire,
each of us waiting, at rest,
until she turned from desire
and stepped lightly afield.
(I see her at twilight
enter the gloom of deep woods,
leaving a trace to be tracked into night
or forgotten.)
***
On this plot of untilled ground
we call a garden, I wait
and watch the ebbing embers.
The moon is nowhere to be found
as cold impends to penetrate
the warm aura that shelters
my limbs. To be sure,
I rake the ash-cool coals
until flames rekindle and stir,
flickering in mirroring windows
down the dark and quiet street
—all the while creepers
and crawlers teem in the soil
undisturbed beneath my feet.
Time comes to end the day’s toil
when, putting foot to hayfork,
I pitch the tines and stand at ease,
at last fulfilled with work,
and listen to a chorus of peepers
in the dark beyond the trees.
***
To A Mistress
That night
I burnt my thumb
joining headpipe to manifold.
I swore;
you said a demure
“I do that to things.”
In my drive we sat
and smoked.
You were the austere
Lady of Fate;
I accompanied.
Tendering my name
with an understanding I
had never heard before,
you spoke.
You said you weren’t a fictionist,
just poet.
Poetry we agreed on.
The porchlight behind
made you a flickering shadow
before my eyes;
you sat like Shiva
on my front fender.
I wondered at your words:
Shantih you chanted.
I watched,
mesmerized—
the mystery of your soul.
When the ghost of fire
glowed at your lips
your obsidian eyes
said, I know.
Ever since that night
I’ve been your slow apprentice;
at times it doesn’t pain.
But angry of manifold hurts
I still often burn,
and am still
much too profane.
***
The End
Thank you for reading
Alas
She was some lass, some lass she was
She was, she was, she was
When she was mine, she was my lass
My lass, she was, she was
Until no longer mine she was
Until no longer mine
Until no longer mine she was
Alas, no longer mine.
***
Begone