Thursday, December 21, 2017

solstice fires

solstice fires
burn the old year’s dross
to ash . . .
the raven’s cry
like smoke on the wind


~red lights 13:2, June 2107

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

the galloping years

my mother’s voice
reciting The Highwayman
by moonlight
the gleam of a dark red love-knot,
the clatter of galloping years



poplar leaves
already freckled
with age
I pen an elegy
in elderberry ink

~Moonbathing 17, fall/winter 2017


finding I’ve shrunk
by an inch and a half . . .
yet the mountains
of my inner island
still converse with sky

~hedgerow 122, winter 2017-8

  


Sunday, December 10, 2017

Roots



The old sugar maple at the southeast corner of the house had been declining for two years, and despite a wet summer its canopy was brown and bare long before autumn.  Yesterday, men with chain saws took it down limb by limb, leaving a gaping hole in the sky where the tree’s green depths once harbored hummingbirds. On winter nights I used to look out at its windswept branches, combed by fingers I never saw.

moon shadows
on the window pane 
. . . the silver
of my mother’s hair 
fresh-washed in death



Friday, December 1, 2017

quicksilver



autumn harvest  . . .
moldering hay bales
sprout new grass
even as the whetted scythe 
mows down the years

no one
told me of his death,
the last
of my mother’s siblings . . .
ripples on the pond’s dark eye

the moon
so far beyond my reach
and yet I drink
from its reflection
this dipperful of light

other mothers’
diamond brooches . . .
I buff
the mossy jadestone
of her silver-legged frog



~Ribbons 12:1, Winter 2016