{"id":5250,"date":"2015-08-27T16:31:08","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T16:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregglory.com\/wordpress\/?p=5250"},"modified":"2023-07-08T10:19:43","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T10:19:43","slug":"assembling-the-earth-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/assembling-the-earth-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Assembling the Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Purchase from Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/span>\r\ndark nature poems<\/strong>\r\n\r\n\"A mouthful of earth to remedy all.\"\r\n- Edward Thomas\r\n\r\nGregg Glory\r\n\r\nPublished by BLAST PRESS \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
To a Summer Hailstorm<\/h2>\n
I have been in existential hail\r\nSince Noah first began to bail;\r\nHailstorm, shake me till my sadness goes;\r\nStrike me till new blood flows.\r\nRavish mind with unfettered ice;\r\nLet cold be all of your advice.\r\nThunder down and dent the car.\r\nRemind us of winter with a faithful scar.\r\nStrip skin to tatters with your kisses,\r\nOnly, hailstorm, do not miss us.\r\nTear the mailbox from off its stick;\r\nFreeze the healthy and the sick;\r\nFill the chimney with cotton balls;\r\nCatch the walker in a squall.\r\nRattle buckshot with heaven's force--\r\nI am the target, you the source.\r\nDisappear and vanish in a drought\r\nTo all but me, who keeps you caught\r\nCloser than my second thought.\r\nMagnificent blank in skies above me,\r\nStoop to whisper that you love me;\r\nLike a naked cinder for your use\r\nSeize me, hailstorm and muse.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Ordinary Things<\/h2>\n
There's a dark deep down in ordinary things\r\nResists our bringing them into view,\r\nOr else in bringing them what light we bring,\r\nAs if to ask the question 'Who are you?'\r\n\r\nI do not know what answer I would make\r\nBeing myself, and, so, invisible--\r\nAlthough I know when I give or when I take,\r\nOutfitting my days as I best am able.\r\n\r\nThere's a dark deep down in ordinary things\r\nResists us, the way a mirror pushes\r\nUntil we're left again with things as things,\r\nAlone among our daylit doubts and guesses.\r\n\r\nI am one keeps to himself, and although\r\nI do, I do not keep the dark alone.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Wintering by the Atlantic<\/h2>\n
[Sonnet Version]<\/em><\/p>\n
\r\nAs snow and snow will in snowing meet,\r\nWhat slid down danced into a wild sleet\r\nAnd randomly clung, each to each, \r\nResisting ocean's disassembling touch           \r\nThat undoes the individual who falls\r\nAnd in that fall returns to ocean's all.\r\nThere was nothing there in what was of sky,\r\nNo help of light to help say why,\r\nOnly usurpation's snow-deadened hiss\r\nThat ended each self-formed singleness\r\nDistilled from upper vagueness and the cold.\r\nThey did not fall because they had been told.\r\nThey fell because there was nothing else to do\r\nBut fall, and this the ocean knew.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
In a Manger<\/h2>\n
It lay self-entangled, curled as ramshorns,\r\n-And pushed the belly into being mother--\r\nWho, to be herself, had first to the Other,--\r\nWhich looked as if it didn't want being born.\r\n\r\nIts sideways was more, and worse, than backwards.\r\nIt had to be sawn out to be itself a lamb,\r\nStartle the clover and bleat \"I am.\"\r\nThe bowie knife came handy without a word.\r\n\r\nA tense scarlet torn sort of giving-in,\r\nA clattering shape cauled on scattered straw,\r\nUngainly upright legs besides the ewe's,\r\nShook me wet and bellowed out of pain.\r\n\r\nWhat had come too soon would need a mother's milk.\r\nI pulled all night through wetness with raw silk.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
The Paper Mill<\/h2>\n
I look into the portions of my thought, cold and dull.\r\nWheel in wheel unsettles the quiet mill asleep\r\nAnd puts an uneasy harness on all I feel.\r\nThe river like a clock runs fast and deep.\r\n\r\nSoon there will be paper, deep and white.\r\nWet slush from the chute, heaps of pulp and dust,\r\nDriven by the living water to be a blank in sight.\r\nA haaing gear gives my cheek a buss.\r\n\r\nI pole a belt to the drive shaft, and all begins--\r\nHorses in wheels turn, turn in their dreams;\r\nFloorboards shake with purpose, dark and dim.\r\nThe razor nibs of the saw-wheel start a seam.\r\n\r\nI weep, weep for sleep and do as I must.\r\nI look into the cold dull portions of my thought.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
A Blue Perhaps<\/h2>\n
The provident power of hurt and harm\r\nThe provenance of an eye ingathers,\r\n(Its certain witness of a moment's charm\r\nThat lightly changes a life forever),\r\nBluely demonstrates in this morning glory\r\nThat measures us, our smallness and our fear,\r\nWith too blue an eye to ever bear\r\nUntil a touch of night shuts its story.\r\nThen we dream, with a certain sort of blue rue,\r\nAnd wonder in sleep's deep wanderment\r\nIf the sun will show us what to do\r\nOr if dreaming can tell us what we meant.\r\nAn eye perhaps has followed us all day through,\r\nBut we do not know the eye's intent.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Water-Break<\/h2>\n
Having grown long words in fieldgrass daylong,\r\nI stepped into a wooded brook to dip\r\nInk-worded hands into the snickering quips    \r\nOffered up by the silverquick stream;\r\nI wondered just what the water had meant to mean,\r\nWhose loose stones insist the water into song.\r\n\r\nMany times I had lost what footing I had felt,\r\nSuddenly cried out, or laughed in despair,\r\nBy hard wet things beneath thrown over,\r\nRaw agony raised to the eloquence of a welt;\r\n\r\nAnd, with water in my mouth, I'd often remarked\r\nThe sincerer operations of the lark,\r\nSpilling a slippery noise above taciturn rocks \r\nThat break bones and never forget.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Rooted Things<\/h2>\n
Three dark junipers shadow where time stood,\r\nRepresentative of my brothers and\r\nMyself, from earth and water grown to good\r\nPlain wood on the township's public land.\r\n\r\nHuddled under them by the neighboring pond\r\nFireworks cracked to color July the Fourth;\r\nWe then, as I now, beside the dawn-like mud\r\nStood every year we'd been on earth,\r\n\r\nThree stranger brothers our divided folks\r\nReaped as seedlings from the brick adoption house\r\nInto a home too shy and shamed for such a name.\r\n\r\nNow torn away ourselves to spouses\r\nAnd lives, from rooted things by time unyolked,\r\nI stand between the trees without a name.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Wake<\/h2>\n
I wake in dark. The air itself seems stained.\r\nThe dark appears a darkness self-sustained\r\nBy whatever of darkness must remain\r\nEven at whitest noon. But this is not noon.\r\nThis is the dark without a shadow, without a moon;\r\nA dark that won't stay shut in rooms;\r\nOne that follows even the ripest mood\r\nAnd rots there, and will not give way to good.\r\nThis is the dark wolves build in woods\r\nWho have no hands and whose teeth are sure.\r\nThis is the black that cancels the cure;\r\nThis the emptiest hour and the deepest hurt.\r\nThis lies behind eyes and bottoms every heart.\r\nThis it is that makes a faster beating start.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
The Ant-Lion<\/h2>\n
His dusty body goes backwards to be dust.\r\nOn dust more frictionless than ice\r\nA frantic slipping ant will make us wince\r\nTo see a crucible mind no more than claw;\r\nA mind that harbors no dark thought to appall\r\nBut shapes his perpetual falling wall.\r\nHe does not jump for justice or to be just.\r\n\r\nSummer's first rain-drop rolls in dust a world\r\nWhose wet invites all wetness hints of growth\r\n(Such a world may we recognize in drought).\r\nSilent and dry, he emerges like a roar\r\nAnd makes the molten tension burst,\r\nAnd drowns himself with water, nothing more.\r\nAnd a something unrepeatable is learned.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
The Willow Bond<\/h2>\n
\"Let's have a game of truth or dare,\" she said.\r\nShe snapped a longly hanging willow-wand.\r\n\r\nWe shared the field with no one but ourselves\r\nAnd the willow that knew us from the play of years\r\n\r\nThat fountained alone and yellow in the field.\r\nWinter's tears to April dew had yielded.\r\n\r\n\"The game is played by our both being blind\r\nUntil the willow tells true where true love abides.\"\r\n\r\nA hint of mischief's smile filled my closing look.\r\nShe offered an antennae-end; I felt and took.\r\n\r\n\"A willow wand between two lovers' hands\r\nCommunicates the tension of love's bond.\"\r\n\r\nThe switch, whip-supple, wetly flailed,\r\nLive as a shedding snake held head and tail.\r\n\r\nI felt, where dew-bewildered life had broken off,\r\nA sad pull; something, then, lent something soft\r\n\r\nTo our springtime game of gain and loss.\r\nThe wand had left a distance for us to cross\r\n\r\nAnd reared between us a budded arch\r\nForever flowerless as frozen March.\r\n\r\n\"My question is: Will you love me all your life?\"\r\n\"What you mean is: Will we be man and wife?\"\r\n\r\nI broke into a laughter I did not understand.\r\nThe willow sent it on to her own blind hand.\r\n\r\nPerhaps this willow, being the duticle thing it is,\r\nAdds a playful pulse to those it passes.\r\n\r\nSomething about the way the time compressed,\r\nOr how the intercessor willow hissed,\r\n\r\nMisgave me to give the game my heart;--\r\nAnd that too went out along the drying bark.\r\n\r\nWhat we are, I thought, we are by accident.\r\nWhat happens makes us bend as we are bent.\r\n\r\nI kept eyes open now, sure that hers were shut.\r\nA glimmer or a tremor of I knew not what\r\n\r\nLaid a furrow clear across her forehead,\r\nAs when question answers question as we'd feared\r\n\r\nAnd not as we had hoped. The bond, the branch, snapped\r\nSudden as two children's hands can clap.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
The Abandoned Tower<\/h2>\n
We drove almost to the mountain-top,\r\nAnd had no wish leave it when we stopped;\r\nNo wish to leave the dew-enhanced, dew-christened air\r\nThat pleasured the lungs like a circus scare\r\nWhen the sure trapeze for once escapes talced fingers\r\nAnd the mind on sudden emptiness must linger\r\nThat had thought to catch a glittered body's twirl.\r\nThe thinness of the atmosphere made dull\r\nThe closing click of doors when we stood\r\nA moment out of the car and out-of-doors.\r\nSunset took the higher half of woods\r\nAnd the tin toy of the Ranger Tower\r\nAnd showed us how a second Troy would burn.\r\nWe smiled to see just what we understood\r\nAs we stood together without a word,\r\nWithout the cluttered need to speak and yearn\r\nThat had made our road-trip Cassandra and the King.\r\nThe library had malformed our limbs\r\nTo wood, as much as books are wood, by sitting still \r\nTo read. We were over-ready to try a climb\r\nOr try our no-words silence or try anything\r\nTo stretch out the long day of many knots\r\nOur deep need to know had dearly bought.\r\nThe road swirled up away from feet at once\r\nRound the mountain-top as round an ice-cream cone;\r\nThe road was rock and mist, the bones of clouds,\r\nRed tatters gone redly under sky's west rim,\r\nLike lashes of an agitated eye grown dim.\r\nWe watched small spots of dark swell and bud\r\nAnd swarm up after us all the way until\r\nAt the last powerline we were caught\r\nIn a fatal undertow like a single thought.--\r\nWe walked on colder, with dark-adjusted eyes,\r\nStill rounding toward the top. Things in nature\r\nCried out their alphabet of names, but none\r\nWere ours, or reflected back any name we knew.\r\nOur silence stretched between us like a clue.\r\nFootsteps added footnotes one by one\r\nUntil we had left lower for higher ground for sure.\r\nThe tower sprang into the interrupted skies.\r\nSpray paint through a lettered grid of spaces\r\nHad tiered the artifact with conflicted texts.\r\nWe smiled once again to see nature vexed;\r\nTo touch where some derelict human trace is.\r\nWe grinned, too short of breath this time for speech;\r\nWe would have said a word or two this time,\r\nFor comfort's or for habit's sake, among pines\r\nWhere, in counterfeit of clouds, we saw our breaths\r\nTouch. But we were wordless and rib-sore,\r\nOut of perspective in a piney bowl\r\nRushing up around us like a garden wall\r\nThat aimed to keep in both flesh and soul\r\nWithin the clear-burned stone which grayly bore\r\nThe bolted tower that rose without a door.\r\nWe might as well have been inside a kettle\r\nWith the tower for a witch's ladle\r\nFor everything additional that we could see.\r\nWe scanned the structure for defects, but hurriedly.\r\nWhat with the talus and its getting late\r\nWe knew we didn't have the time we had.\r\nStill we gripped the rungs; they poured a cold\r\nBeyond experience under our skins.\r\nThey were put here for a purpose, as a gate\r\nIs put- to propose a boundary and suggest\r\nA sort of going through. Of course, the jest\r\nIs that the gate can't tell who's going out or in.\r\nAnd we ourselves can't be sure of what we take\r\nWith us, in a purpose we call ours.\r\nThe sky began to stipple with young stars.\r\nEach strut galvanized chilled hand to sweat,\r\nSo that we had to pull rolled sleeves over \r\nEach rung, and get what grip that could make\r\nTo hoist ourselves a little more above.\r\nOur collars had been thumbed up since we'd begun;\r\nOur inch-thick sweaters had been left to hang\r\nLike exhausted swimmers over library chairs.\r\nStars jarred and jumped --no, that was our eyes--\r\nWe took two deep sucks in to every one\r\nThat before our sojourn had satisfied.\r\nWhat mist was in us at once would seize\r\nInto ice spider-webs instantly as breath.\r\nI hung halfway up a minute and heard\r\nThe charm of deadened church-bells in her tread,\r\nRinging on the upward steel as cold as death.\r\nI looked around afloat in the tops of trees\r\nDizzy as masts and yardarms in a racing sea.\r\nNight had come upon all things everywhere.\r\nThe trees put on their cassocks black and bare,\r\nBut refused to give a redemptive air.\r\nTrees, gathered for prayers, stood devout.\r\nThe tower was all exposed angles and no lee.\r\nShe was where I couldn't quite make out--\r\nLoudly made the platform on hands and knees.\r\nSomething of ice came down in shards.\r\nA keening wind, whetted almost to urging,\r\nMade me wonder darkly at the wooded ring;\r\nThe mountain leaned to windward\r\nAnd snatched my shirt to tell me \"Come and see...\"\r\nWith a knowing note of something up a sleeve.\r\nBut this was more than would fit what I believe,\r\nMore sleeve and deeper than what I knew of me.\r\n\"You should see it up here, you really should.\r\nCome up, Kerry, and hold me by the shoulders.\r\nThe world's as small and sharp as in a mirror.\r\nIf you shout down the mountain, you can hear\r\nEchoes carry your own voice back, but clearer.\"\r\nAs if Earth were one to put our feelings to\r\nWho never once told us what to do.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
A Death in Woods<\/h2>\n
I kept as solitary as a wood alone\r\nAnd often walked till all I knew dwindled to rumor\r\nTalked from another country in a half-heard-of humor.\r\nWhen death gave me up, I could keep the bones.\r\n\r\nToday, having at last journeyed past myself,\r\nI looked into a little wayside brook\r\nWhich, by caring nothing, all my nothing took.\r\nI left a husk to worry a rocky shelf.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
The Water-Mirror<\/h2>\n
One year all year I kept the pond for mirror,\r\nAnd tasked water in place of one that broke\r\nAnd so had run out of looking luck.\r\nThe pond re-made me foot to head,- and, nearer,\r\n\r\nShowed my face as something like, no clearer.\r\nFlat stones I scalped across what shone for song\r\nLaughed at my distorted self the summer long.\r\nThen one day in the polished lead of water\r\n\r\nI saw what my broken mirror showed too often: fear\r\nOf eyes in eyes, a black kept-back glance\r\nDesperate for breakage like a last chance\r\nTo be itself something more than a moment's stare.\r\n\r\nWhen autumn came, and I dared again look down,\r\nA reluctant pond as rough as hands hid my face\r\nFor days, but not the sense of my disgrace.\r\nLeaves above my pallid blur mocked me with a crown.\r\n\r\nWinter's stintless nights full of wishes as a star\r\nDrew ice across my mirror in a frozen sheet\r\nObscure and cold, and chilled a glance that\r\nKnew me once, and I held back a shiver.\r\n\r\nWhen my breath came back to breathing more at ease--\r\nWhen pond had been blanched ice long enough--\r\nI thought how roots go down, fathomless and tough\r\nTo stretch what stark water offers into trees.\r\n\r\nThen I looked again, with midnight thoughts,\r\nAt the rowans surrounding.- And then beyond all thought,\r\nFar into the night, and past night to coming dawn.--\r\nI looked into my mirror and hoped Spring again\r\n\r\nWould wake it as full of fears as it had been.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Would Not Have<\/h2>\n
On an uneven roof comes midsummer's chore\r\nTo clear the flue that had all winter roared--\r\nA core of darkness with a throat of fire\r\nSoaring to a speech of sparks that suspires--\r\nWhite-hot fleets into a world of frost,\r\nA second set of constellations we may cross.\r\n\r\nI cleaned with broom and water, a working witch\r\nFouled by the labor black as a sewer ditch,\r\nLike pulling up a fountain by its roots\r\nThat has no cleaner wet than velvet soot;\r\nEvery swish and lunge bade me be a bear\r\nUntil an evening's scrub would wash me clear.\r\n\r\nI heard a cry like a baby's squeak.\r\nA bat. Something in me that could not speak,\r\nBut saw two eyes like spider's eyes to scare,\r\nGave the thought: I would not have him here.\r\nSix million years had put him in his cave.\r\nI sought to sweep him with the broom I waved.\r\n\r\nWe were too much strangers for the bat to fear\r\nUntoward intentions in my coming near;\r\nOur worlds were not close enough to make us foes;\r\n(Hate's a thing of nearness as things go.)\r\nI would not have him there, and thought to undo him\r\nWith a startlement of fire out of season.\r\n\r\nSo I built a fire to double summer,\r\nStood by the heat-wavered flue, heard it hum,\r\nAnd waited like a cat for what would come.\r\nIn a laugh of wings, in a ring of fire,\r\nWhat I saw fly out was neither foul nor fair\r\nBut a living creature of the living air.\r\n\r\n(Face to face, my face was larger.)\r\n\r\nI would not have.... I knew I did not want\r\nSuch rapid flapping in my fireside thoughts.\r\nWhen I look to flame, I demand to dream\r\nUpon flame's own ever-changing theme;\r\nSeeing how it prefigures in earnest night\r\nThe glare of summer, the stars' own light.\r\n\r\nBecause altered fire refused to move him,\r\nI called him a black clot devoid of reason.\r\nI used a poison. (I would not have him there.)\r\nCongealing and winging in the summer air--\r\nHe fell out indefinite as a spill of inks\r\nDark enough to make me think.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
A Wood to Sing Through<\/h2>\n
Our daily catbird in the parking lot,\r\nHalf-unknowing his danger where he stood,\r\nSang out eyes-shut atop a cinder block.\r\n\r\nA blue abandoned Cougar, its purr removed,\r\n(Haunted all last night by a pregnant stray \r\nHunkering into home in her birthing mood)\r\n\r\nHad a dead crow's feathers like an exploded toy\r\nPuffed from under a moveless wheel hoved tight,\r\nFeeding what must come, at most, in a day.\r\n\r\nObliquely by her belly kept from being quite upright,\r\nIn cotton fog half-obscuring our shared world,\r\nThe mottled cat sat motionless on one stripe.\r\n\r\nThe catbird's territory song searched vacant grounds\r\nThat should have had a wood to sing through,\r\nNot learned to be inured to all our sounds.\r\n\r\nI wondered how I'd feel with the catbird shooed,\r\nMother-cat nursing uncurled by the curb,\r\nPatched kittens purling dust just where he flew.\r\n\r\nSilent in the silence man-made things disturb,\r\nThe cat, too quick for me to see, pounced once,--\r\nAnd the catbird, leapt to asphalt eaves, sang on.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
A Bronze Creeper<\/h2>\n
I had come too long down my own way now\r\nTo trouble with what signs dreamed appearing:\r\nThe simple-minded purpose of an arrow\r\nAn impertinence of trivial clarity\r\nPointed only to waves of vines that drowned it,\r\nGetting more vine-entangled the more I walked--\r\nNature's green indifference a match to man's.\r\nMourning doves cooed the midday shadows soft.\r\nI left all plans behind me and dropped intent\r\nBack with those signs, and leaned my father's valise\r\nInitialed in cursive gold against the last.\r\nI would pick it up when I returned to reasons,\r\nSagging in voluptuous vines with a leather sigh.\r\nMourning doves cooed the gathering shadows soft\r\nUnder wavery arms of patchwork sycamores\r\nDeep in the broken bounty of the wood\r\nWhere no sand-path of man or dog had stepped\r\nTo interrupt the easy gloom of leaves;\r\nIndian Pipe and a fungus stump gave\r\nA heavy odor the nose ignored.\r\nThe mockingbird with enviable ear\r\nTalked to all his neighbors in their own voice,\r\nAs if by their sharing some outward wail\r\nThey shared some single mystery at source.\r\nHalf a sycamore had blown down dry\r\nLike a thrown blade-switch in an electric storm;\r\nVines evinced no interest in its half-dead form,\r\nBut rode the living half half-way high.\r\nThere were whirlpools of vines in those woods,\r\nShunted hard aside all the time I walked them.\r\nA bronze creeper takes its own time in ascent,\r\nUsing a tree's own strength against it,\r\nSnake-slow up to the tree's own lofty end,\r\nLike cloud gone everywhere or like climbing fire;\r\nBut more I think like fire than cloud\r\nOr perhaps a fiery cloud come down\r\nTo threaten all that grew up from ground.\r\nThe wires that fuse back from its leaves\r\nTighten years against the tree-spine in a grip\r\nTo shadow-out leaves that block the creeper's light.\r\nA grip once light as feathers, lighter.--\r\nYet shows the trick of closing tighter,\r\nHand over hand, or leaf over leaf\r\nMore properly, it makes its imagined height\r\nMatch the trunk's achievement grown up right.\r\nThey share a center that discernment sees.\r\nBut the outline, like a helix spun, begins\r\nTo burr and blur like an old old man\r\nWho can't hold even his own old name in mind,\r\nUntil all the limbs lay overtaken \r\nBy a wilder interposing dark of green\r\nThat turns dry birdsnests out to ground\r\nOr catches in an interlace of palms\r\nSmall-nippled nuts before the autumn-fall\r\nDrops them to the danger of maturing.\r\nHow many years had I grown outbound to here?\r\nI hear my own father laugh and shake his head\r\nAt nothing I had thought, or at something\r\nSo far back it was plain invisible to me.\r\nWell, now perhaps I can sense the why:\r\nWe had been let drop to grow, for reasons not \r\nOur own-  chance, or even evil, occurrence\r\nWith nothing of our own doing in it.\r\nWe're left with nothing else to do but grow;\r\nWhat better purpose has a laugh than sensing that?\r\nAmong a friendly roundelay of fieldgrass,\r\nA sycamore has its life-plan laid out\r\nFrom the first frond of its setting forth,\r\nUnaware of how its reeled-in corkscrew\r\nWaits to over-awe and overshadow all.\r\nThe grasses murmur nothing all day but sun.\r\nNor does the sycamore seem to posit\r\nHow its holding out beneath that summer sun\r\nProvides just the slip of shade the creeper\r\nIn all its years of greenly slithering\r\nHas learned to need. Once I came upon a giant\r\nSycamore sequestered in a neck of wood\r\nCrowded as town, so hazed-over with bronze\r\nFilaments root to crown, it seemed on fire--\r\nThe triumphal creeper self-inwound above\r\nEven the crown of the vine-engulfed tree.\r\nAll the trees surrounding were backed away\r\nAs their live skirts might catch- but the effect\r\nWas only the halo-emptiness of life\r\nThe dead tree had claimed in adoration of sun,\r\nThe slow outward longing of love's eternal\r\nIntertwine of warmness and warmed being.\r\nHere was a love affair too cruel to countenance\r\nOne side all terribly requited want,\r\nThe other too reserved to ever push,\r\nAnd that was another story out of life.\r\nI knew down in that those who would not stand\r\nOftimes retained the power of hands\r\nAnd, seeming weak as lace, still could strangle.\r\nThis courtship would have no day in court;\r\nA long struggle, and a single end.--\r\nThe corpse had a solemness, I'll give it that,\r\nThe way a bonfire dies down to ashes\r\nAnd obedience. But it had no dignity,\r\nNothing of itself amid the choke and flame.\r\nBole and limbs still held themselves, riddled through\r\nWith spiny roots that cared nothing but to use.\r\nA squirrel confused the leaves for a desperate hour\r\nAnd then chewed clear. The creeper had no use \r\nFor birds, lightest true climbers of the wood,\r\nAnd to their coming down proffered a net.\r\nThe creeper was everywhere and was everything.\r\nWe do not know our purpose, but onward creep\r\nAs a mood may creep day to day on fire \r\nBehind our walls, knowing nothing but to creep.\r\nThese flamy bronzes too, were too desperate\r\nOf their own old man's hairy grip and perch\r\nTo hazard seed beyond their flame in flowering;\r\nWhat flowers came of that flame showed too poor\r\nAnd too few to drop the match-head seeds.\r\nNew life must only smolder here this season,\r\nHowever wary the trees of renewing smokes,\r\nThrown scarves to scar and catch the throat,\r\nAnd envelope a head made blind to its own good.\r\nThe creeper, for all its bronze-fire threat,\r\nHad no enemy but itself, --heh, --\r\nAnd spent its life in extending tendrils\r\nOf itself, all green willfulness and dare\r\nHurling its shapeless metaphor outbound\r\nTo some self-supporting taproot, to be\r\nThat tree, that life, if but for a time--\r\nStretching and warping its bare being\r\nTo another's bones, the way any son\r\nInherits his father's laugh, and in time \r\nHas his humor, right down to the last laugh.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Aims<\/h2>\n
Bullets 'oft gang awry'\r\nWhen we squint with lying eye\r\nAt the target we had thought\r\nTo level with a shot;\r\nSomewhere along the barrel\r\nOur curving expectation falls\r\nAnd what is becomes a part\r\nOf what we hope to shoot,\r\nOr perhaps an intervening wind\r\nHas changed beginning and the end.\r\nThe future always lies\r\nSomewhere in the 'is,'\r\nOr so the marksman's maxim goes\r\nHunkered in a bush of rose.\r\nThe future always lies\r\nSomewhere in the 'is'\r\nOur eyes are scouting now;\r\nHope and here intermix somehow,\r\nNor get pulled apart\r\nUnless our killing art\r\nDelivers to the shaping thought\r\nThe dead end we had sought.\r\n\r\nThe philosopher with his carcass\r\nDispenses with his guesses\r\n- What would be now is,\r\nAnd this is happiness.\r\nNor does he as he eats inquire\r\n\"What if I had not fired....\"\r\nOr if a speck of dust had interposed\r\nBetween his sightline and his nose.\r\nAll the dedication of his thought\r\nGoes to digestion of what he's brought\r\nFrom the wild field, as able,\r\nTo his domesticated table.\r\nNot until quick hunger comes again\r\nWill his thoughts curve and turn \r\nTo all the 'Ifs' of chance\r\nThat can cancel out his choice\r\nAnd send aim or word awry\r\nIn the hunted day.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Existentialist Dilemma<\/h2>\n
The dilemma of doing's to 'have done,' \r\nAnd by choosing from Many be left with One. \r\nAddition's chief mischief is dubbed a sum;\r\n\r\nThe unwary mistake it for a total solution.\r\nThe wise contend that all is confusion, \r\nOr at best a formal intuition.\r\n\r\nTo act presumes belief, or so I'm told,\r\nAnd am pointed onward, backward, or upward to God, \r\n(And reminded not to mind the length of the odds). \r\n\r\nThe less done the better is my subtractive reaction. \r\nI'm not quite afraid to feel quite forsaken, \r\n(Except that, of course, I might be mistaken).\r\n\r\nOne thought is left me, with which I'd begun:\r\n\"The dilemma of doing's to 'have done.'\"\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Good and its Opposite<\/h2>\n
There's a rhyme at the joint point of knowing.\r\nThere's a place, a way of saying, that clearly makes\r\n\"Good\" and it opposite resonate, and even ring\r\nThe way a glass cries out when struck--\r\n\r\nSharing its invisible essence like a singer.\r\nGlasses, brim to abyss, display a range\r\nOf interchanging tones to the ringer\r\nWho bangs the magnanimous Strange.\r\n\r\nDoes a sip sip the Good, or a sip sip the Bad?\r\nEither way the song sways, half-empty, half-full.\r\nThe opposite of Good's not Bad, but\r\nOdd, whose disobedient music's beautiful.\r\n\r\nWhat words can we sing, for the Good, for the Odd,\r\nThat will make them ring out, spoon-struck, like God?\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
The Mental Garden<\/h2>\n
A rambling meadow scenery\r\nRank with irrigated greenery,\r\nShowed a semi-sawed-off double dozen\r\nOf saplings stretched since Spring, some\r\nWaist-high to heaven, that autumn's\r\nClear-cut mowing would take care of\r\n(Not much of disordered growth\r\nSurvives the park's enforced swath).\r\n\r\nNature's mistakes seed a scene\r\nWith a richer oddness than she means.\r\nPlants that harbour high ambitions\r\nNeed time and shade for such positions.\r\nIgnore me long enough, and I might\r\nJust get to be something; kids grow at night.\r\nAdults enlarge by thinking through\r\n(So I've heard said, and think it true). \r\n\r\nA modest eraser can undo\r\nA millennium's gain by rubbing through.\r\nI bite my new ones down to wood\r\nAnd trust to cross-outs, understood\r\nArrows, and wild whole-page insertions.\r\nErasure's just too much exertion\r\nAnd never pays for the lost word\r\nThat down the line might have proved good.\r\n\r\nHuman education is a crop\r\nBest harvested without a lop.\r\nShapely shape the upward trees\r\nBy what mind kens, and heart perceives.\r\nThe grandest but add leaf to leaf\r\nTo make their roundness right--\r\nJust so the round of human life\r\nRequires a necessary height.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Definitely<\/h2>\n
In the right angle of a fence\r\nDefinitions first commence\r\nTo lock us into making sense.\r\nBy running round and round a thing\r\nWith a tape measure for a string\r\nWe hobble it to give us wings.\r\n\r\nIts only from our having tried\r\nTo live without a why inside,\r\nOr, like a mystic pray tongue-tied,\r\nThat we have ever given thought\r\nTo holding in what we have got\r\nTo see what we've done without.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Chain Chain Chain<\/h2>\n
Once upon a time, I had slightly\r\nBruised my fingerend in tying\r\nUnneedful knots too brutally.\r\nThe knots were sonnets, gracefully\r\nLosing bout by bout in rhyming,\r\nDespite my careful scratching\r\nThat annulled no spot of itching.\r\nI had not thought that writing\r\nWas so much like fighting\r\nOr two witches bitching\r\nSo under-epidermally.\r\nI stayed at it relentlessly\r\nTying tying tying\r\nEvery \r\nMusing, \r\nBruising\r\nBlossom stylistically.\r\nThe daisy-\r\nChain was for no one particularly\r\n(Or perhaps I am lying)\r\nYou know how things get tangly\r\nWhen we practice firstly....\r\nThe lengthening \r\nString of words got too stringy\r\nAnd self-involved in singing\r\nThat should have taken flight more singly\r\nBy whistling \r\nUnconcernedly\r\nAnd not too self-consciously,\r\nThe way \r\nA clumsy \r\nKite, so sprightly\r\nCan climb all day \r\nBy dodging\r\nMore effortful breezes, never too longly\r\nLodging,\r\nNever aloft too lingeringly\r\nUntil the crisis of a knot too thoughtfully\r\nUnthoughtful cripples the so skyey \r\nThingy\r\nInto a crooked tree.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Introrse Proportions<\/h2>\n
A clouded day in a warm week\r\nIs little, in a whole month a week\r\nOf rain, sans weekends, is OK;\r\nA covered month of storm and soak\r\nIs welcome in a year of weather\r\nThat puts sunburns and hurricanes together.\r\n\r\nSo when an inner barometer\r\nFlails\r\n        from hails and rain\r\n                 to shine and sweeter\r\nAnd darkly back again\r\nTo damnably, darkly fail.... whatever.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Lucid Interval<\/h2>\n
You are the thing I love, no lie.\r\nYou have given me despair.\r\nI don't know how, I don't know why,\r\nBut my faith has come from there.\r\n\r\nI key my verse on my hearse's side:\r\n\"All our knowing burns down to 'Why?'\"\r\n-Nor give a fuck about my verses' pride\r\nThat they may live, and I must die.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Evening Argument<\/h2>\n
 <\/span>\ti. She\r\nA slippery sense of mental decay\r\n\tsharpens the knives \r\n\tand the wits of the wives \r\nIn drawers long locked away.\r\n\r\nThe sunset casts a spurious look\r\n\tto calm the unmentionable ache\r\n\tin my unmentionable place\r\nWith a Hallmark sort of trick.\r\n\r\nBut the hidden hurt must out;\r\n\tthe curse must make its choice,\r\n\tmatch inner and outer voice,\r\nAnd let the quiet heart once shout.\r\n\r\n\tii. He\r\nWhy are you so quiet?\r\n\tWhat have I done?\r\nSilence mounts the table\r\n\turgent as a gun.\r\n\r\nAll night we've argued mazes\r\n\tand all night the night before:\r\nWe see ourselves in the window glazing\r\n\tdart glances at the door.\r\n\r\nYou'd glad be shut of me--\r\n\tI'll be quit of you, I swear--\r\nAnd in the going horse of voice and voice\r\n\twe bed each other on a dare.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Roundabout<\/h2>\n
I had stopped myself at noon, amused\r\nOn an abandoned track that moved\r\nThrough a wood no longer used,\r\nThrough waste acres of a watershed\r\nCloven by a regular runoff where\r\nClarity was wildered by wild briars.\r\nUntil a hidden water's hissing\r\nShowed that something else was missing,\r\nOne never would have wondered \r\nThat anything there had harkened\r\nAt the juncture where briars darkened\r\nAs if by deepness of the angle\r\nAt the midmost of their tangle.\r\nSomething moved beneath the plane\r\nWhere the interrupted track regains\r\nThe far oasis of the wood,\r\nSomething going crossways where I stood,\r\nCrossways to my onward motion.\r\nI stood without a blessed notion.\r\nAt the very precipice I paused, \r\nAnd waited to see if what had caused\r\nMe to arrive there once\r\nWould cause me to hurry further on.\r\nI listened to what I could not see,\r\nWater in the dirt continuously\r\nSpattering against such hazards\r\nAs its pattering traversed.\r\nI spied the farther side, which seemed\r\nIndifferently like where I was indeed,\r\nA wood moving on to wood,\r\nA leafy dark neither bad nor good.\r\n\r\nA tree, once proud upon its ridge,\r\nLay translated into a bridge\r\nAt my left, and the track repeated\r\nIts pattern as it retreated\r\nPast the tree's, an oak's, fallen crown\r\nStripped to wires on the farther ground.\r\nI put my foot, and it seemed\r\nTo hold upon a mossy cloud\r\nWith just a warning creak or two\r\nThat subsided like morning dew.\r\nAnother step, another crack\r\nAnd I was airbourne along my track,\r\nAnd the whispered waters loudened\r\nTo an almost-roar unshrouded.\r\nThis was something, then, a place\r\nUnusual in the closed-in space\r\nThat gives woods a closet feel\r\nOf uncomfort, of bodies real\r\nBut mentally disposed of,\r\nThe way we take our clothes off\r\nAnd refuse to see them wrinkle\r\nAny longer as real people.\r\n\r\nHad the slope been undermined,\r\nHad the tree been dealt an ill-timed\r\nBlow by lightning an age before\r\nMy feet had brought me to this shore?\r\nWhatever the history, I took\r\nA naturalist's close firsthand look\r\nAt the detail that feeds the mind\r\nWhen mind's to thinking first inclined\r\nAnd all the world's a wonder\r\nAs perpetual as thunder.\r\nThere's an art, a large art, of course,\r\nComprehended in just looking close.\r\nThe moss had browned to gold, it seemed\r\nUnfed by any mist or stream\r\nDespite the pounding of the sound\r\nThat made a pulsing all around\r\nCentered in my ears. Still firm,--\r\nSo then, just a dry summer's harm,\r\nNo more, curable by summer storm\r\nSoaking live roots back to greenness,\r\nThe dieback of a season's meanness.\r\nAn ant with an aphid hat hurried by\r\nAnxious of her fresh supply.\r\nAnother step, another, and hushed\r\nCame the crumble where foot had crushed\r\nThe intradose of a termite arch\r\n(Found more often in a fallen larch);\r\nA colony of teeth in such bone-hard wood!\r\nWhether bored, or because they could,\r\nI could not know, and understood\r\nThat even in a thing so small\r\nI myself could not measure all\r\nBy limits of my comprehension.\r\nBut now, done with desecration,\r\n(Or, more optimistically,\r\nAeration of the tree)\r\nThey left to found another nation\r\nWith colonists from this way-station\r\nWho pack up their idea of home\r\nAnd take it with them where they roam.\r\nAnd now the whole tree was hollow,\r\nAnd houseless hoot owls inward followed.\r\nAlso into this interesting\r\nEmptiness, came bees without a sting,\r\nCarpenter bees who hustled and tore\r\nTermite tunnels to a larger bore\r\nFor their solitary parlors\r\nConveniently near both briars\r\nAnd water. Who'd've thought there'd be\r\nSo much of life in so dead a tree?\r\n\r\nI had gone down upon my knees\r\nIn my investigation, pleased\r\nTo spend my day in something other\r\nThan myself. I wondered whether,\r\nAs I stood again on what stood \r\nNo more, if I should include\r\nWhat was father on out there\r\nNow I had come thus far to stare;\r\nMy thoughts surrounded me like fog\r\nIn the middle of the ruined log,\r\nAs unsteady of my footing there\r\nAs unsure of my going.... Where?\r\nI peered a step just past my place\r\nAnd conjectured farther on a pace;\r\nThe path behind was twice the gauge\r\nAs the dwindled path on the next stage.\r\nIt seemed that most upon this track\r\nHad come this far to double back.\r\nWell, I never have had more regard\r\nFor that stepper Kiekegaard\r\nThan for my other walkers in the wood,\r\nIntending to walk on as they should,\r\nInstead walking only as they do.\r\nI kicked a little nothing from my shoe\r\nAnd made my balance come and go,\r\nUnsteady and unstable how to go,\r\nUncertain and unsure how to know,\r\nKicked a something from my other shoe,\r\nAnd in the end continued onward, too,\r\nAs few had chosen here to do,\r\nAs all who are not only bones may do.\r\n\r\nTo keep unlost, as doubt to doubt\r\nYou wander roundabout your route,\r\nSimply do not doubt your doubt.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Grave Spaces<\/h2>\n
The town blind behind, blind woods ahead,\r\nAnd a whitened graveyard here.\r\nI stood alone with my luminous dread\r\nIn the dying of the year.\r\n\r\nFrom the midnight hill I'd seen below\r\nHuddled graves, yet each alone.\r\nAnd here and there in the hollow, low,\r\nA dent in snow without a stone.\r\n\r\nPoplars dropped odd shadows, the moon\r\nDropped a mood. Whatever talk may tell\r\nIn me had talked-out too soon.\r\nI brushed a small glow from where it fell.\r\n\r\nThe stony concentration of a face\r\nShone angel no longer- here the snow\r\nWears his worn-out years of grace\r\nTo the blankness of his soul.\r\n\r\nHis name's gone out like shopfront lights,\r\nHis verse survives by guesses.\r\nWhat had brought me here was what night\r\nHad done with my distress.\r\n\r\nI walked out from being\r\nAnd walked to having been;\r\nLiving was only seeing,\r\nDeath's just having seen.\r\n\r\nThe bell was black and the time that tolled\r\nWas an absence in my heart.\r\nInto those bleak letter-gaps, I had rolled\r\nFor all my part.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Wintering by the Atlantic<\/h2>\n
A midnight ocean and a stippled snow\r\nGreyly perceived from a rail I know\r\nShared the grainy dark of here and nearer.\r\nWhat water was above me seemed uncertainer.\r\nWhat rolled in mist below rolled solider.\r\n\r\nAs snow and snow will in snowing meet,\r\nWhat slid down danced into a wild sleet\r\nAnd randomly clung, each to each, \r\nResisting ocean's disassembling touch           \r\nThat undoes the individual who falls\r\nAnd in that fall returns to ocean's all.\r\nI could not tell just what my seeing meant\r\nNor how long soundless darkness had been lent;\r\nThere was nothing there in what was of sky,\r\nNo help of light to help say why,\r\nOnly usurpation's snow-deadened hiss\r\nThat ended each self-formed singleness\r\nDistilled from upper vagueness and the cold.\r\n\r\nThey did not fall because they had been told.\r\nThey fell because there was nothing else to do\r\nBut fall, and this the ocean knew.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Late-Flowering Bush<\/h2>\n
Beyond the serious torches of several cypress trees,\r\nThe dusty chirrup chirrup of militant cicadas,\r\nThe noble solitude of a solid lonely oak\r\nClattering his leaves at the sun over a bleached field\r\nThat balanced his high growth by spreading out,\r\nDesert-like and hot at noon, and all afternoon\r\nUntil the evening made them equal sharers \r\nOf one shade, a blackness welled up from the root.\r\nBeyond all this, beyond the blushing bluish grasses\r\nAnd inner darkness of some evergreens out right,\r\nI thought to see what seemed from the county road\r\nA sweet hilarious patch of beech, tittering \r\nAmong more sober rowans, and walked on\r\nFarther than I had thought at first to do.\r\nA forest darkness hustled, a coat atop my coat.\r\nAnd so I came upon a late-flowering bush\r\nHidden deeper in among more doubtful darks,\r\nTaller and elder, more august and up high.\r\nIt was way out of season, much too too late,\r\nYet full of hopeful blossom regardless\r\nOf the season's clock; it kept its time its own--\r\nBefore the long sharpness of the frost that tapered\r\nIn shadows till midday, it held its whites aloft.\r\n\r\nThe flowering bush was a thing itself, alone,\r\nClotted with milky flowers as large as fists\r\nAs if to claim a space among the harder barks,\r\nAs a child will feel more brave at midnight,\r\nStartled from a nightmare, to smile in the dark,\r\nOr as a father walks twice round and round \r\nA house, for proof he really has a home.\r\nThe flowers asked for bees that would not come\r\nTo so shaded an interior, whose buzzed instincts\r\nCould not guess to lead them there, too far\r\nFrom the sugary buttercups and tigerlilies of the field;\r\nThe bees were busy with their honeys and their hives,\r\nToo industrious to bother with this thing alone.\r\nI wondered what had made the seed drop here\r\nAll those years ago when this bush first pipped.\r\nHad some panicked thrush raced bewildered through the thick,\r\nOr been carried dead by some hawk, and dropped?\r\nHow had the seed, which loved the sun, found \r\nFiltered light to endure, in the coolness all about?\r\nHad some tree burned out and a dormant seed \r\nBeen sprung, hot from its casing, into germination?\r\nI'd known an odd old fellow who had not\r\nHalf begun to sing until he was half past eighty,\r\nAnd his voice as awful as an old phonograph;\r\nBut still he sung, and mostly pleased himself of late,\r\nAnd showed the lyric shavings of sharpened wit\r\nTo any too-curious; those words were his fists.\r\n\r\nAbove us all in the little clearing, the dull touch\r\nOf a near cloud's inner-lighted immanence\r\nBroadened into mystery over man and bush.\r\nSomething happened then, I did not know\r\nHow much until years afterward had stretched\r\nMy roots into some new dark flowing underneath.\r\nBut then, I did not know what I would become,\r\nAnd, never having intended to be there once at all,\r\nAnd having forgotten all about the patch of beech\r\nThat had first sent me off into the dark,\r\nI shook my head at the flowering bush and took off.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
A Winter Eden<\/h2>\n
A soft possible snow had descended\r\nAnd let the moon climb down from the sky.\r\nThe world lay in whiteness without witness or end.\r\nSnow lay on the tree-limbs like ladder-rungs rounded\r\nAnd softened my cold need for why.\r\n\r\nNot a blank footstep, not a note of sound\r\nIntruded on the marvelous sight.\r\nAll creatures, all creation slept like the ground,\r\nAs though no other dark did our dark surround.\r\nA winter Eden and a winter night.\r\n\r\nAnd then I thought: It is as if some other than\r\nThe snow had snowed down or in,\r\nColdly immune to storm or reason.\r\nEach hour I held that thought held only harm.\r\nI searched the moon-snow transfigured farm.\r\n\r\nThe fallen night I found, I found no ease in. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Wet Weather Promise<\/h2>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\r\nBreathing close, I notice our airs\r\nHave lately come as close to tears\r\nAs any injured feeling bears\r\nA human made alone by fear.\r\n\r\nAlready this mist's been here three days,\r\nImmune to our creator's rays;\r\nWhere it came from it did not say.\r\nIt has not gone again today.\r\n\r\nHeaviness lingers on every bush,\r\nLimned in weak whiteness near as touch;\r\nAll that moves, moves only to hush.\r\nAnd, as I said, it makes my breathing close.\r\n\r\nOnce I was unsure of whether\r\nEyes and earth could share a weather,\r\nDespite our eons so close together;\r\nNow I know, I should feel it better.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Milk-Weed<\/h2>\n
A milkweed has it in it to become \r\nSomething, and challenges the field \r\nWith myriad pods above the other stalks, \r\nAnd then there's the whiteness, all that whiteness, \r\nClumped and disparate with the wind slow, \r\nA slow diaspora that struggles mostly \r\nInto our reservoir just there, or plants its flag \r\nIn the same field that served as home. \r\nThere's that in us as well that never waits,\r\nThat wants out,- and gets out too,- past fields\r\nIt blows out onward always in the mind,\r\nSame as the milkweed taken root and risen\r\nTo spurn its soil, and dies in seeding out its thought;\r\nJust so, our light cares, light temptations\r\nLift out and abandon us, and we wish it so.\r\nSome other valley's always more our sort,\r\nSome other sunset igniting through the gorse.\r\nHand me that dead milkweed stem you've \r\nYanked up there- thanks. See how the lips\r\nHave gone to beaks with vomiting dreams\r\nAll day long and under the August sun?\r\nHere's one deep-in hasn't the heart for escape,\r\nFor leaving the only home its ever known;\r\nNo matter if that home is dead or soon to die,\r\nHome is home. There's a reach in the design,\r\nWispy almost-nothing pulled to this seed\r\nSoft as a moth, perfect for an escape\r\nOnce the pod's blown out, hardened to scrap--\r\nNecessary for these feathers to move on\r\nInto the endless. Rise after rise\r\nLies past this embankment of peaches, straight on\r\nTo the sea out somewhere, toward the Pacific perhaps\r\nTo judge by the wind. Never thought of it,\r\nAlthough I suppose we all crawled from there,\r\nBut that's one home not hardened yet,\r\nNot the sea, not yet, or if it had,\r\nSomething else has troubled it back to life.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
The Compass Rose<\/h2>\n
I ride the night-yard's rose bush like a saddle,\r\nBurning to be nearer what shines afar,\r\nAnd visit all the dreaming stars for marvel,\r\nMy rose and I still waking where we are.\r\nAll below is lost, I believe in what's above.\r\nUnburied from sleep, I and my heart arose--\r\nAs full of feeling as empty of self, they say.\r\nBut knowing myself as I know my yard and rose,\r\nI say, \"Losing finds all again; there is a way.\"\r\nTwenty years about both house and bush I've spent;\r\nTwenty years dreaming to the rose-soft summit\r\nWhere the sun arises a rose and sets a rose.\r\nHaving gone round in love, I return to love;\r\nI wake to see where my rose-dreaming goes.\r\nMy compass rose is cunning, her roots are deep.\r\nI dream the dream I need when I dream of sleep.\r\nThe self is buried, and its roots are mossed.\r\nRoots are what come of being lost.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
finis<\/h2>\n
This quick collection saved my life.<\/p>\n
June 11th – June 28th 2001<\/p>\n
<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Purchase from Amazon   dark nature poems “A mouthful of earth to remedy all.” – Edward Thomas Gregg Glory Published by BLAST PRESS To a Summer Hailstorm I have been in existential hail Since Noah first began to bail; Hailstorm, shake me till my sadness goes; Strike me till new blood flows. Ravish mind with […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[414],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-assembling-the-earth","category-414-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7415,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250\/revisions\/7415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}