Category: Nature
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Shade is beautiful wherever you find it
Concrete squares lay out for miles, tar driveways melt, made endless by eager sun. Crisscross blocks, seek any shade. Detour through Paul’s dark garden path — relief of damp cool. Delay the last bright patch ’till dinner. Sprawl in the grass by Marbach’s on the tiny hill we made the center of the earth. Ponder…
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Atonement
The winter was kind to the day lilies and goats weed this year. They burst wild showing off ambitious new roots. It was less kind to that little hinoki I transplanted in September. Alas, reckoning begins. I pluck it from the soil. Birds flit seeds where they may, freeze lines rise, fall, encroach, the sun…
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I heard the screen door slam
I heard the screen door slam in my head, not angry, just lazy — the workaday world suffocates in the forest, rootless, unable to press itself on its inhabitants. Hearing the slow creak of the rusted spring echo up to higher branches, mix with the bluejay’s caw, one might guess early morning, perhaps dusk. What…
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Intimacy
What I always wonder in a place like this is how many people have walked this ridge before, over how many centuries and what have they thought looking down, across, overhead into the trees, towards each other? What, that is different from my crowded thoughts right now? Where are you, earth? Someday, I will find…
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Old elm
Abandoned farmhouse, greying outbuildings. Our old elm on the corner that died last year stood through the winter to remind us of its broad generous shade, kind relief now removed. Empty sky. Time unwinds, pulls me back to your year as sapling in crowded woods before this town, this house. Our kinship holds, deeper need,…
Poems from in between 