{"id":5592,"date":"2018-04-28T00:38:45","date_gmt":"2018-04-28T00:38:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/?p=5592"},"modified":"2023-07-08T10:19:41","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T10:19:41","slug":"thistle-wins-by-gregg-glory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/thistle-wins-by-gregg-glory\/","title":{"rendered":"Thistle Wins"},"content":{"rendered":"<pre> \r\n\r\n<p>A book of poems<\/p>\r\n\r\nGregg Glory\r\n[Gregg G. Brown]\r\n\r\namazon.com\/author\/gregglory\r\ngregglory.com\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Wild Places<\/h2>\n<p>Once all wilderness was innocence.  Later, all wilderness was sin.  What does it say about wilderness, that it could be both sin and innocence\u2014a space of condemnation and reprieve\u2014at once?  What does it say about us, limber interpreters of vastness?  Every day someone takes a snapshot of themselves with the Statue of Liberty on his shoulder, or the moon upheld in her palm, the violent grandeur of the universe turned by metaphor and pixel-flash into a beachball.<\/p>\n<p>Now we find our wildness in suburban glimpses: long weekends away to a campsite, the unwonted sting of a bee.  Yet we were made by wildness;  we were wolves before we mellowed to dogs.  When observation and observance sharpen beyond the roar of words we soothe ourselves with, the tickertape of conscience and prayer unspooled to silence, we can see the action of life plain.  The constant taking, the inevitable greed, camouflage, and waste inherent in all things.<\/p>\n<p>The sun knows nothing but to burn.  The salmon little else than to breed and feast.  Our arteries are red with burning, veins blue with hunger.  A paranoid, irascible eye sees many raw things civilization has regretfully gilded; an eager ear\u2014with its vestigial muscle for turning still intact\u2014may yet attune itself to the strangeness of what is.  Listen.<\/p>\n<p>Parables are everywhere is our daily doings if we listen, the ear of consciousness arranging random notes and facts into pattern, the flare of consciousness illuminating new mosaics in the old catacombs. Life itself, in all its accident and happenstance, is transformational because our consciousness is partial. <\/p>\n<p>We can\u2019t see all sides of an object at once like a cubist artist. We cannot even experience ourselves consistently across the daily divide of sleep; at best we are strips of stuttering film. We bridge these gaps with memory and imagination. And reality is the perpetual testing grounds of that self-invention\u2014and poetry, at its finest, with its honest looks at what is\u2014is the checklist for that reality.  Words are the net we use to draw reality into us.  So use that net, anxious to add meaning to your ultimately unknowable life\u2014the omnipresent wilderness.<\/p>\n<p>Gregg Glory<br \/>\nApril 1, 2018<\/p>\n<pre><em> <p> <\/p> \r\nShy in their herding dwell the fallow deer \r\n...spirits of wild sense... \r\nPrintless as evelight, instant as dew. \r\n\r\nJohn Drinkwater \r\n<\/em>\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>After Thin Winter<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nMy tongue fell like a gravestone, flat \r\nInto silence, when I heard the darting lark, \r\nAn amplitude of bees at the azaleas in spring \r\nAnd the mad abandon of frogs in their croakeries \r\nAs the kiln sun outlined fingerling icicles, and snows \r\nReceded.  What was killed at Christmas was made ready, \r\nMade mud and substance for new life at Easter, \r\nElegant as grass dancing from the fundament. \r\n\r\nWhat songs I had cribbed in my dab, crabbed hand \r\nAll winter long in my grey oyster\u2019s cloister \r\nBlandly abandoned their pearls in my mouth; \r\nWhat I had deemed gospel is proved uncouth. \r\nOnly silence and stillness can I bring to what\u2019s given, \r\nThe badge of eager ears my only sign of office, \r\nA wideness of eyes my warrant for living, \r\nA narrow nose my keel, and sighs for my sails. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>River Dazzle<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe sun hooks the eye\u2014 \r\nA fishingline of light\r\nTeases daubs, gobs \r\nOf unready tears \r\nFrom the prone fisherman. \r\n\r\nThe arc of history, the arc \r\nOf his lazy cast, are \r\nIdentical to God\u2019s, one \r\nMore blind parabola among \r\nMany hits and misses. \r\n\r\nStill, he watches his bobber, \r\nSun of its own solar system, \r\nA clownish bellybutton  \r\nPinned in its gravity well, \r\nHelpless as a marble. \r\n\r\nSomething beneath bites; \r\nHis wary, wired eye sees \r\nNo more than Schrodinger \r\nTrapped outside the bottle \r\nHe fishes to investigate. \r\n\r\nThe bobber is an eye- \r\nBall in a troubled socket \r\nNippling the rubber sheet, \r\nInflicting wrinkles, crowsfeet, \r\nAnd no nest to home in on. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Salmon Run<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nBaby salmon are born simple fillips of thin light,\r\nThumb-smears of ectoplasm, long eggs \r\nUnfurling into elegant flags of tails \r\nThat plump through long late spring luxuriously \r\nAs any mat of pasta filigreed with fins. \r\nThe racer spritz of underbelly speckles \r\nMakes her indivisible with the river, devotional, \r\nA sweptback speedboat divoting the current\r\nLambing the surface with sunny braids of wooly foam, \r\nThen, dive after dive, memorizing each shadow grotto, \r\nBy lounge and lunge investing the homeplace with myth\u2026.\r\nSleepy or ecstatic she swims, until the day comes \r\nWhen salt first touches the innocent lip \r\nAlerting galvanic gizmos in the svelte groin \r\nAnd the salmon, in mass chorus, beg the river \r\nTo lead them away, like following the grain of an etching. \r\nAway from childish eddies, from mild tideless nights, \r\nAway from reeds in their tactile millions, from oniony beds  \r\nOf emptied fish eggs;  away, away and down \r\nTo the silver-slippered whaleroad of the sea! \r\nDown to the breakers and badlands, borderless lagoons, \r\nCompleting, with raw luck, a Pacific circuit  \r\nAs round as the world  Magellan imagined, \r\nWhere each nimble slit face will bleaken into a claw, \r\nEach corvette exterior ripen to bitter red \r\nAnd only the sly survive. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Constitutional<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nBales of daybreak scatter broken hay\u2014\r\nShreds of light the early parkground\r\nFeeds the eager eye, waking ringing birds. \r\n\r\nGolden gears of day get going, annoying \r\nDrunkards and latecomers, laggards \r\nToo timid to escape their asylum of dreams. \r\n\r\nThe foot crunches cinders on the cold park path \r\nAs woods enclose the walker in dew-dim green, \r\nEars and eyes awake for what brambles disclose: \r\n\r\nA syrupy dewlap repeating to its mate, \r\nThe bitter gabble of a squirrel on high, \r\nHow the referenceless blue of sky intrudes. \r\n\r\nAt a stop where rubber joggers stretch \r\nHe sits, a chalky bubble doming at his feet \r\nA moment\u2019s irritated digging reveals \r\n\r\nTo be the stark arched catacombs of a skull. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Woodpecker<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe woodpecker hammers in deafness,  \r\nAn arpeggio of ellipsis dots \r\nTurning the trunk into a thunderous drum \r\nLoud as a cloudburst, a wail of electric \r\nLightning in the downpour of his beak, \r\nItself a splinter of the woodpecker\u2019s brain \r\nHis single nail of intention drilling \r\n\r\nA rabble of insects from the desert wood, \r\nFleets of them fleeing Egypt, half-grown wings folded \r\nLike packs on the refugees\u2019 backs \r\nSeeking Sinai beyond the impassable banks\u2014 \r\n\r\nA place of sacred song, bonfires and worship, \r\nTheir stump wings become angel feathers \r\nThemselves grown golden in face and limb \r\nRaising all their hallelujah voices in song together \r\nA circle of safety and praise \u201cHallelujah!\u201d \r\nAnd only the tamed accompanying tumble of drums \r\nTo remind them of the woodpecker. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Two Pike Beneath the Rail Bridge<\/h2>\n<p><em>for Mat Spano<\/em><\/p>\n<pre>\r\nA snake of shadow doubles in the water\u2014 \r\nA grounded pike in his cold redoubt, his \r\nTroubled blur of darkness underneath him \r\n\r\nRolls over motes of stones like a cut kite-tail, \r\nIn a water-flight of greedy feeding, snap and \r\nStrike after strike into terrorized small fry \r\n\r\nThat blaze his evilly thin needle teeth with blood, \r\nCurling broody clouds into lake-light and weeds \r\nAnd obscuring the dumbshow action of a life. \r\n\r\nII\r\nThe weight of the pike, black as a wrenched rail spur,\r\nMeditates in his mysterious underworld, gleeless \r\nAnd deeply green as a Christmas bough\u2014 \r\n\r\nI am life! I am knife!  he seems to say, scissoring \r\nHis blunt course beneath the taut causeway, \r\nA troll below the ebony river\u2019s surface, shadow \r\n\r\nInside shadow, his deathly inches glistening ink \r\nAs he writes the page of life black as himself \r\nOr his shadow-self, the self that guides the knife. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Moment of Silence<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe little brown hen, beheaded \r\nRan about the dusty clucking yard like an abortion \r\nHer spur of blood a race flag  \r\nStippling the yard with dark dots, beautymarks \r\nFor a full minute.  The other hens stopped clucking \r\nAnd left their feed unattended to watch, \r\nTo feel the dark sprinkler pass by batting them\u2014 \r\nTheir eyes vaguely gathered, vaguely lit. \r\nAll scratching hushed, and the sun stopped. \r\nFor a full minute I think it was, yes. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>The Duck, Shotgunned<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe duck, shotgunned \r\nCaught the full volley of pellets, \r\nSteel circles like pilled thimbles \r\nSpreading inner fire with a hundred matchsticks \r\nStruck in the smoking under-feathers, \r\nThe trim wings wide, as in delight mid-flight  \r\n\r\nBut here is suffering and ripping, \r\nA million zippers stripping skin, \r\nAll your fingernails blown off in a single twinge \r\nAnd nerve and blood left to baste in air, \r\nBathe in pain \r\nForever. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Death of a Housefly<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThis is the basis. A faceted particle \r\nBearing its pair of window-wings, a fractal \r\nReflecting Nature\u2019s majesty in grim miniature. \r\nA dot of the universe made blood and hair, \r\nThe infinitesimal start of the Big Bang\u2019s buzz. \r\nThe nodule, the nada. \r\n\r\nThis dead housefly \r\nPracticed spastic pratfalls through the rooms\u2014 \r\nA black note following what conductor\u2019s wand? \r\nAmong damaged fruit and unguarded ears \r\nIt made its itchy way. \r\nStumbling, staccato, on tiptoe. \r\n\r\nI watch the billion connections blossom \r\nFrom his rainbow bowl-of-gumballs eyes \r\nTo my duller ones, practiced and lidded. \r\nDo you see, the fly whispers, how alike we are? \r\nWere you a gnat, I would swat you, fly says. \r\nAs you are, I sip blood from your hairy walls. \r\n\r\nThe dead housefly flitters from the counter \r\nTo the floor in summer\u2019s mangy breeze. \r\nIts universe is over, its finale played and applauded. \r\nI negotiate broom and dustpan in procession, \r\nKnock the little bugger into the too-full dustbin \r\nAnd ring shut the metal lid like a cymbal. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Metal Detector<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nA flying saucer on a stick swings back and forth \r\nOver the dirty beach, the dribble of grime \r\nThat marks the tide\u2019s high assault, the clamor \r\nOf a slug\u2019s cold unwanted kiss. \r\n\r\nThe flying saucer swings, and swigs of sound \r\nFilter a staticky hash through my cupped earholes, \r\nThe sound post-apocalyptic, waiting for the bright bing \r\nThe inimitable click that signals a tossed coin, \r\nThe fine wire of a hairpin, the lost Mayan gold \r\nOf a forgotten money clip. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>A Wheel of Hooks<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nTurns in the eagle\u2019s flying eye, zeroes down \r\nTo peg a live shadow in the grass,\r\nHaul it sputtering to nest.\r\n\r\nTwo chains of hooks its feet\r\nDangle shaggy dragnets \r\nOver\r\nSumptuous innocuous indolent meadows.\r\n\r\nA hundred hooks gather into feathers, \r\nClimb the frigidaire air barb by barb,\r\nClawing against gravity to flight.\r\n\r\nA hook, too, is the prowlike \r\nBastion of beak \r\nBattering ribs with its stick, incising \r\nDesigns into totem, \r\n\r\nCurve after curve\r\n\r\nIn the bloodied broken side of its prey.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Slender in the Grass<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nSnakes are boneless trombones sliding slender in the grass. \r\nTheir alphabets are all hisses, \u201cAsss to Zsss.\u201d\r\n\r\nTheir eyes, like birds\u2019, are liquid wax droplets of black, \r\nPools of dark rumor and wells of ancient observation.\r\n\r\nThey ride the damp ground like a whip writhing to stiffness, \r\nThwacking desperate cracks in the dirt to attract a skinny mate. \r\n\r\nA snake\u2019s razor mouth widens to a gulp when any beetle lands near, \r\nIts split rainbow back a Swiss Army knife of displayed wings. \r\n\r\nWhen rains come, churning and flooding the ripped field, they swim, \r\nTheir lengths alert S\u2019s suddenly alive as kitetails in the teeming wind. \r\n\r\nThey know no road but hunger, and sleep their meals down for days, weeks, \r\nGiving back to the damp uncaring ground a mouse\u2019s intricate skull, \r\n\r\nA spittle of skeleton, forever ivory and wideeyed. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Setting<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nWhere to begin?  A confusion of thorns \r\nBesets the setting sun with a hash of prison bars; \r\nNight\u2019s limber elements are rising from the earth \r\nReanimating darkness, giving limbs to missing light, \r\nRaising a black wave over our heads \r\nCricked down for evening prayers, then a meal. \r\n\r\nBut for now, all is still confusion\u2014 \r\nThe old barn taut with disintegration, its hard \r\nLean away from light;  the tempest of songbirds \r\nArriving noisily to nests in the sun\u2019s abatement; \r\nThe raccoon\u2019s paw awake to darkness and theft; \r\nThrills of a million moths detaching themselves \r\nFrom the sloped sides of trees, their daily guards. \r\n\r\nThe eagle, the snake, the hawk, the dog retire. \r\nIn their place, night\u2019s minion, the hidden thrust, \r\nThe secret grasp\u2014oh, death by any other name, \r\nDeath by a thousand stratagems\u2014all recorded \r\nIn the reflective eye of the cat at the window. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Cadaver in Vastness<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nTime the hammer and time the anvil \r\nClaws raw gobbets from the cadaver. \r\n\r\nA quiet of observation invades the hills, \r\nWraps the sliver viewer in vapor. \r\n\r\nThe child\u2019s dog had run away down the road \r\nNo farther than here; \r\n\r\nHere were no green ingots of gravehills, \r\nJust one dog rotted to a husk, \r\n\r\nA blackened comma stuck out beyond \r\nHis tongue\u2019s final saying. \r\n\r\nThe cliffs, quilt-patched like coral, \r\nStill melt in immeasurable mists; \r\n\r\nTrees swing their long beards over the brook, \r\nFish alive among their barky toes. \r\n\r\nBut here at the dark roadside, a cavern \r\nAxes dead halves of a ribcage \r\n\r\nInto darker futures, a vastness \r\nRealer than stars. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Lizard Evening<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe lizard in the ditch, his brain a chip \r\nTurns his chipped eyes to the sun \r\n\r\nThe lichened rock he spraddles is pocked \r\nWith stars of greenish lesions \r\n\r\nA harshness of stars is in his twenty \r\nFingerends roughed for gripping \r\n\r\nHe is sure of nothing, not even gravity \r\nAs he glares at the universe from his rock\u2014\r\n\r\nAlong his spine a constellation gathers \r\nLike a trail of bulletholes in God\u2026.\r\n\r\nThe lizard in the ditch, impatient for flies \r\nSlowly splits his jaw, spits his split tongue \r\n\r\nAs if to lap up the sun, its tunnel of cauldron \r\nOne changeling flame at a time \r\n\r\nUntil night comes, however ugly, and only his \r\nSpine of stars is shining \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Watching Wildlife<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nShe\u2019s surprised, her eyes foolish, owlishly large, \r\nTwin fishbowls slopped with infinity, her mouth \r\nDropped doll-like open in a pinkish, pale gash \r\nA slash touch of drool spooling a corner. \r\n\r\nWhat is it that she\u2019s watching?  A second moon \r\nShouldering out from behind the first \r\nWe know so well, like our own splotched hand \r\nFamiliar and veined and always available? \r\n\r\nNo, not that.  It\u2019s something closer to home \r\nLike a threat, a chainsaw hiccupping off a nail, \r\nIts blade loud and wild, a deadly blurr, \r\nA blaze of steel thorns throbbing sparks! \r\n\r\nShe watches so carefully, so pitilessly, a poised \r\nTan animal about to pounce perhaps, \r\nWatchful of her victim\u2019s teeth, array of claws,  \r\nHidden stings, woodpecker\u2019s beak like a sewing machine, \r\n\r\nThe power of muscles thumping a bone skull like a club. \r\nYet she herself is still, fearless\u2014\r\nAlone, empyrean, detached, fatalistic, \r\nA girl standing at the edge of her own green yard, \r\n\r\nAmbivalent, balanced. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Vultures<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nFlesh was never less alive \r\nThan in their claw-hammer mouths,\r\n\r\nGobbets and blobs dripping from beaks \r\nWry as fishhooks.\r\n\r\nThe spurring rabbit the truck wheel had winged \r\nLeft nailed to the asphalt\r\n\r\nNow a grim etching by Durer, tendons aghast, \r\nGashed open like a surgeon\u2019s how-to\r\n\r\nTo the slow thoughtful desecration of the doctors \r\nHunched around their diagnosis.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Thistle Wins<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe icy field is stiff with thistles, \r\nPencils jammed in a holder, grey bristles on a chin. \r\n\r\nThousands of bareheaded golf balls rolled to a stop, \r\nEach beheaded head bedizened with pins. \r\n\r\nHow long did it take for these roots to creep? \r\nThese spiky knobs to rise like fists? \r\n\r\nEach hidden root connects to another root, root to root, \r\nA starchart under the earth\u2019s dirt. \r\n\r\nI stand here alone as winter makes us alone: \r\nBanging my hands for warmth, stamping my feet. \r\n\r\nIf I had a mirror big enough \r\nI could show this overrun world its face. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>River Waving and Waving<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nA stillness is in it.  Leaden.\r\nEven though it is waving, waving continually \r\nIt\u2019s always with the same, tame, martinied \r\nGlassy indifference.  Green-eyed, squatting, squalid\r\nAs a toad, as lipless gelid. \r\n\r\nA fresh-water jellyfish or squid laid on a board \r\nWould look as lively, as livid, lurid. \r\nAll day loping the gaping bank, its wound of water\u2014\r\nSummertime anglers, day-campers \r\nNever too far from stoves and faucets, \r\nThe womb of home. \r\n\r\nI put my hand into river coldness.\r\nI drop a baited hook into its goop. \r\nI stoop for smooth dull stones to throw at it.\r\nOr reach into the silver house with a threaded wish\r\nTo catch flesh I de-shingle and eat\u2014 \r\n\r\nThe red welt of fish-wealth \r\n                          held in the fire\u2019s fingers \r\n\r\nAs evening gains in the trees \r\nAnd darkness erases faces. \r\n\r\nSzzz\u2014Too hot to touch!  This \r\nFrying sliver of river. \r\n\r\nBut stabbed with a stick, I bring it up \r\nGreedily between my teeth. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Bats in a Cavern<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nHere\u2019s no light but an echo of light \r\n\r\nLight like a black ear flapping \r\n\r\nSmall-boned bodies flapping in a known womb-cave \r\n\r\nThe whole place the scraped inside of an eye, waiting \r\n\r\nAnd the sprawled dawn-cry comes, a thousand cries \r\nSkreaking and streaking like train cars\u2014 \r\n\r\nTwice a thousand ears eating dawn like an egg! \r\nA black egg, viscid and filling \r\n\r\nAll is known, all is revealed, x-rayed by those cries \r\n\r\nThe bugs the guano the catacomb litter\r\n\r\nTheir little fur chests line up like soldiers \r\nGlued to the gleaming ceiling of the cavern \r\n\r\nClawing the raw stone \r\n\r\nOne thousand faces split and dripping \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Gnats<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nLess than a thimbleful will make you lose the will to live. \r\nGnats attack at the interstices\r\nWhere sweat lives under an eyelid, a slick\r\nLick of paint no one could mistake for tears.\r\nA peppering of infinitesimal bodies\r\nIntent on your discomfort, they fly into hinges\r\nOf elbows and knees\r\nGiving their gamey smell when crushed \r\nOf rotted olives.  Too small to wipe off\r\nThey remain, a grit of pulverized guts\r\nWaiting for the laundromat\u2019s absolution,\r\nThe shower\u2019s cloudy powerwash.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Song Sparrow<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe sparrow, wrestle-breasted arrow of song, \r\nIndignant arc lamp of day, sky\u2019s-spy, deliverer of God\u2019s notes \r\nTo mute mortal ears, lug jug-handles on the wine pot\u2014 \r\nHow like a spook you move in the thin limitless air. \r\nHow beyond deftness your swiftness.  Sheer circles of light! \r\nAnd in an endless ring you are singing\u2014phrases, prophecies, \r\nThe moulting basketloads of insects yet uneaten! \r\nAnd the sun comes through your mouth, too;  the sun, \r\nAnd all the crying stars of yestereve, tearpricks in the blueness. \r\nConstellations align to your wingtips, grasses part at your \r\nPassing, nature and songster at one in the dewsweep. \r\n\r\nNo more clotted gobblings of domestic turkeys, blind clucks \r\nEarthbound and beaten to repetitious hawkings of mere sound, \r\nBruised wattles hanging diseased over all song, any singing. \r\nHere is a choir of velvets and visionings, long lusterful sighs \r\nThat folds the sky in your pocket, all in one fluffed breast. \r\nIt seems to have no nest, but when the nest is found, \r\nTucked like an ear under a crest of rosebush, or suddenly \r\nThere beneath a worsted whorl of fieldgrass, with old bandages \r\nOf eggs, cast off crepe from the birthday party, sharp discardings \r\nThat gave rise to this, to you, gripping your perch, \r\nThe striped bullet head bent back in laughter! \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Nesting Swallows<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nStars turn blue in the untended bucket \r\nWhile belly sleeps and wing slopes. \r\nThe day was yours, tin beak, \r\nThe night I keep, says eyelid asleep. \r\n\r\nThe nest rides quiet like a lip of wave, \r\nThe evergreen ever-vigilant of its dark shade. \r\nThere\u2019s nothing to see between the sheaves \r\nOf branches, except the feathery skin \r\n\r\nOf the wind \r\nAt last at rest. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Rockface<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nA war-wind licks the tattered rocks \r\nFrosted with lichen stubble, spare faces  \r\nVisible above green beards. \r\n\r\nThe remains of a farm, of a home \r\nWashed, tumbled to a lumbar spine of fallen wall \r\nSpoiled by a seafoam stain. \r\n\r\nAll the lives here are bone again, are green\r\nMouldy birthmarks, are mottled handprints flimsy \r\nAs a kindergartener\u2019s Thanksgiving turkey. \r\n\r\nShamrock sigils of vigils past and failed\u2014\r\nHail fellowships birthing only this mint rot, this \r\nNothing of wind warring wind \r\n\r\nAnd lichens\u2019 fading greying faces. \r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Prickers<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nPrickers stick to rough jean cuffs covering scuffed work boots. \r\nUnshaven stubble shows the stiff imprint of age, \r\nGaunt gristle of days lived and forgotten, an old sailor\u2019s youth \r\nSailed grey among cows and seas of grass. \r\n\r\nI pull at them at the stone churchyard doorstep, slap \r\nStubborn stubble on worn and faded cuffs. \r\nMy long heedless stride got me here, gathered green days \r\nTo this scruff of stars washing round my ankles. \r\n\r\nPrickers gather thick as ticket stubs in a bottomless pocket, \r\nThe washed-out dates distorted and mangled.  All my life \r\nI\u2019ve come alone through these fields to this frigid steeple \r\nLike a compass needle that always comes round to North. \r\n\r\nAnd these with me, least eminences of the neglected field, \r\nThese rustling pricker-weed seeds with small arms lifted astonished\u2014 \r\nFerrying always with me on my open journey, sticking it out,\r\nUntil I cast them \r\n\r\nIn miserable heaps to the doorstep.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Landscrape<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nHe stood alone, wild in the merry-go-round junkyard.\r\nJagged stacks of tires creaked a rubbery babble,\r\nOily water caught rank in the empty rims.\r\nWhere had they driven, these rearing carnival-wheels?\r\nWhat seen, these charcoal eye-holes outlined in bruise?\r\nMiles they\u2019ve revved and spun, millions of miles,\r\nMiles going round and wearing out, like hearts.\r\nAnd now: a bird pulls out a bit of wire,\r\nThe hasty scamper of a rat keeps dry in mysterious rain.\r\nA weed reaches its thread through some wheel-hole,\r\nWaiting for fate\u2019s snip-snip in the afternoon sun....\r\nWheels ridden to strips against earth\u2019s wheel,\r\nPaired gears kissing and grinding in lifelong marriage,\r\nThe little gear worn through like a wound, dirty,\r\nA wound too old now for even a bandage,\r\nA wound no longer bleeding, really\u2014\r\nA wound where the sky leaks in,\r\nAnd a swindling\r\nWind whistles\r\n \r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<em>To hatch a crow, a black rainbow \r\nBent in emptiness over emptiness \r\nBut flying\r\n\r\nTed Hughes<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>You, Over There<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nSomething happened to you, over there. \r\nA snowy owl invests your shoulders \r\nWith hunches, black minnows drown \r\nYour eyes, between the transfixed cross\r\nAttached at your brows\u2014the stiff track\r\nOf a crow\u2019s kinked foot in night snows. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Graveyard Ravens<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nNot to die.  Not to die. \r\nThe small worm-eye of the raven is so black \r\nIt is blue.  Blue-black, flattening its wings \r\nAgainst a nude sheet of snow, legs \r\nOf tree roots still dark, unconquered by the frost. \r\nThe raven looks about, a small shirr of dust \r\nDrifting from his black forehead, his eye \r\nOf outerspace\u2014without star, without moon. \r\n\r\nHe hunches in his overcoat under a juniper bush. \r\nTo be a raven is to never die, he thinks. \r\nHow many coffins I have stood atop!   His wings \r\nSpread like an evil phoenix, a mourner\u2019s umbrella. \r\nTo him, a tomb\u2019s as good as a barn.\r\n\r\nTo the far left, far from the bee-gatherings of cars, \r\nA pack of ravens scuttle in the margin of a ditch \r\n(With a sound, if it could be heard, of cards shuffling)\r\nEating some earthly remnant, some essence \r\nOf snake, a whipcord pulled to death \r\nLaying its blood-tar scar against new-fallen snow. \r\n\r\nThey are in no hurry, as the snake is not.\r\nThey are seven judges at a trough unburying justice. \r\nThey dig up old pasts into new light, new stabs \r\nAdorning an ancient halo\u2019s glory radiant as irises\u2014 \r\nThat arrangement of spears around a central nullity: \r\nA void, a hunger. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>All Is Calm<\/h2>\n<p><em>for Anna Moran<\/em><\/p>\n<pre>\r\nIt was in winter that she left us, \r\nHer grey good voice gone still. \r\nHer laughter that caught us has kept us, \r\nAlthough her laughter has gone still. \r\nHer hands that held our own and patted, tutted \r\nAnd cajoled, upon her breast lie still. \r\nSnow like drumtaps on her coffin fell, \r\nAnd snow is falling on her calm grave still. \r\nWinter has entered, and she has left us. \r\nWe gather remembering and grow still. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>In Memoriam<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nTwelve mourning doves walk abased in dust \r\nSoft as nuns at their small solemnities, \r\nTheir tan wings folded back to balance \r\nThe hiccupping strut that takes them back and forth, \r\nNodding their sidelong eyes with white lids \r\nDisturbingly human, though no bigger than  \r\nA pinky\u2019s fingerprint, cooing docile as ghosts \r\nAll together where the old dogwood dapples petals, \r\nEach claw-fingered step pawing the ashen earth. \r\n\r\nII\r\nTwelve mourning doves are cooing in a ring,\r\nSoft doxy voices that touch and soothe, such soft\r\nWood-night wood-dark wooing forgetfulness\r\nUnder dogwoods dropping pleasant last petals\r\nUnder a gun-metal morning\r\nUnder the weight of stars\r\nDisappearing blue.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Winter Crows<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nA crush of snow and the house settles, mellows. \r\n\r\nA roofline of unshaved icicles greets a morning hangover \r\nChallenging the cold adjustment of dreams \r\nTheir dark ache of song that passes the night hours. \r\nThere\u2019s something tremendous in a world erased overnight, \r\nLike listening to Wagner backwards or exploding dud ordinance. \r\nThe afternoon funeral looks stark as the Donner party, \r\nA line of crows milling around the golden corncob. \r\nAfterwards, there\u2019s an undeniable deaf amnesia\u2014 \r\nSomething gracious has been mislaid, and then forgotten. \r\nYou never knew so much weight of what is could be, \r\nThat wings could be so heavy, could drag so low. \r\nConversation stopped the day before last, afraid of more news: \r\nCousins insane, grandmothers crippled and punctured, \r\nDivorce served with thin slices of the Christmas beast \r\nAnd a gravy of tears.  And now the power of snow \r\nShows itself in our guarded, hunched, held-close looks. \r\nOur hands are unable to dig out and find each other. \r\nSomething vestigial in us is waiting for spring \r\nBut we do not remember what a sparrow sounds like \r\nOr the shaggy look of a new tulip, blood buds of a maple tree. \r\nThe house creaks like a warning shot, and a step breaks \r\nWhile carrying out fresh trash;  the blender burns out, \r\nInnumerable bulbs are pinched and replaced, or left \r\nTo add a new shadow like a shotgun blast;  a totemic  \r\nCrow bestrides the balustrade like an inkblot.\r\nTime dilates;  we live in the pupil;  we skate in circles \r\nWaiting for nothing, hands on our ears, eyes closed, \r\nFingers no longer crossed in our nylon mittens. \r\n\r\nWe had not lived here till the first loved thing had died here. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>April Fool<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe years are burying our friends,\r\nAnd the beastly bees coming back in Spring\r\nAre buzzy again, the floods of flowers\r\nTrying on new dresses for new caskets.\r\nAnd the air, sweet as it is, is sour to me\u2014\r\nA lone survivor smelling my way \r\n                              Amid fresh wreckage.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Now I know what poetry is for the widower said<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nNow I know what poetry is for the widower \r\nNow I know what poetry is for \r\nNow I know what poetry is \r\nNow I know what \r\nNow I know \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Hitting Seventy <\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nMy spidery jalopy body \r\nMad hair scuppered and scalped in patches \r\nEyebrows of pig bristles, hands daft crabs \r\nMuscle stripped to bait, a gristle-brisket \r\nHung from this skeleton of hooks \r\n\r\nAll mornings hate my face, spitting \r\nSunfire in my eyes to emasculate dreams \r\nTo reason me awake like a razor dancing\r\nIn the splay hands of an anarchist ex-wife \r\nPointblank as the ceiling \r\n\r\nLast night\u2019s smoky martini longboat \r\nRivers away through a hazard of stars\u2014\r\nPuffed to nothing, interstellar dragon-smoke\u2014\r\nThe stolen opium of Chinese poets \r\nDrowned in their emerald slippers \r\n\r\nWorm-white, I face stacked racks of stairs \r\nThe mute unbearable glaring of pets \r\nAnd reeking garbage-trucks of pitiless chores \r\nWith the featherless soul of a beaten pillow \r\nCored mauled punched ignored \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Black Dish, No Cut Peaches Fine as the Sun<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nBlack leaves in black water in a black bowl. \r\nThere is, in it, more than a stir of waters, \r\nMore than black leaves going round, the brim \r\nWetted by whatever the interfering finger does. \r\nWhoever had eaten here has left the bowl \r\nTo weather.  Was it myself who sat and ate \r\nFat-fingered peaches dripping with sun? \r\nOr was that some other, now that autumn\u2019s come? \r\nBlack leaves in black water in a black bowl \r\nSit on the midnight veranda still as thieves. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>The Harp Player<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nWounded, the flying chords work their salve \r\nDeeper into the ear canal, \r\nA mix of melody and grindstone\u2014\r\nThe rhythmic pistons of a piano  \r\nUpended, gutted, on silver display \r\nAnd stroked like an infarcted heart \r\nUntil the pain leaves the strings \r\nAnd the audience cries at the beauty of rescue  \r\nWhile the song whirls on\u2026.\r\n\r\nAnd the harp player, proud and dark \r\nIn his trim dinner jacket \r\nTurns away from your fraught tears \r\nAnd deeplier, and deeplier,\r\nHunches around the wing of his harp. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Hurry, Hurry<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nHurry, hurry  the grasses say.   \r\nThey point the easy way, \r\nHands over their heads \r\nLike divers finding the pool. \r\n\r\nSwiftly, swiftly the meadowlark \r\nLances from the grass \r\nEasy into skies, swaying \r\nHis wingtips as he goes. \r\n\r\nCalmly, calmly the sunset \r\nSets the field afire.   \r\nIf my days like grass must burn, \r\nLet night like larks aspire. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Crooked Hickory<\/h2>\n<pre>\"To myself I told a lie, \r\nI gave it all my heart. \r\nAnd to that lie I\u2019m loyal \r\nThat lies within my heart. \r\n\r\nI cannot unwind the coil \r\nI wound with all my strength. \r\nShe was young who bent it, \r\nAnd I am old at length. \r\n\r\nThe lie that lies within me \r\nHas daily shaped my days. \r\nAnd to that lie I\u2019m loyal, \r\nAlthough I would part ways.\"\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<em>\r\n                       I felt uplifted, \r\nLike champagne in a thin, bright glass \r\n\r\nTed Hughes \r\n<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Cows\u2019 Hooves<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nCows\u2019 hooves stand, planted apart, in earth\r\nWhile flanks gild blank statues in the sun\u2019s\r\nAfternoon onset, rank spillage yolk and gold.\r\nThey jaw cud the way chain-smokers smoke,\r\nThe way old husbands snore while soupy brown eyes \r\nLoom and ruminate, beautifully lashed orbs \r\nSeeing all... or seeing nothing.... It\u2019s hard to tell.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Horse Lessons<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe dawn field was a single whistling white, \r\nEndless star-white grass \r\nAs my feet held steady \r\n\r\nAgainst the gigantic pull of earth. \r\nI stood like a horse watching the sunrise \r\nEmblazon the land, picking out the stripes of grass \r\n\r\nOne by one, and blessing them \r\nAs dawn went on toward day, and the horses \r\nParaded out led by children \r\n\r\nAnd the time for lessons pinched me into speech. \r\nPommel and throatlatch;  cantle, stirrup;  bridle and bit. \r\nGiddup, giddup, \r\n\r\nAnd the whole line of us rose into motion like a wave, \r\nThe grass it\u2019s endless sirrahs intoning, \r\nAnd still cool, still sheltered \r\n\r\nBy some shadow of night\u2019s arrested rest, \r\nThe rustling unhaltered rest of stalls\u2014\r\nStanding still in limb and spirit, eventide divine. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Spider\u2019s Lesson<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe spider diagrams a sentence punctuated by death. \r\nDeath to the fly that tries a new language. \r\nDeath to the butterfly pining for thistles\u2019 pins. \r\nDeath to the moonblind moth tumbling moonward. \r\nDeath to the ant marching astray. \r\nDeath to the inchworm one inch at a time. \r\n\r\nWhen her sentence is finished, rolled up and eaten, \r\nShe embarks on another before night comes vamping. \r\nHer spindle seems limitless, and glistens. \r\nShe rides the lines that terrify with a swift spidery bliss. \r\nHer grammar is immaculate and intricate as the OED. \r\n\r\nShe latches each line with her embroiderer\u2019s glue,\r\nShaking her insides dry in the sun.\r\n\r\nWhen her final web blows forth, \r\nShining skull-white with it\u2019s pirate\u2019s sail, \r\nEven she is impressed.  Even she, seeing the benign design \r\nBig as a spread-fingered open-handed hello, \r\nHas second thoughts. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Feral Cats<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThere\u2019s a skunk skank you notice first, a burn \r\nOf urine marking a boundary like napalm\u2014\r\nBeneath a porch, at the disastered end \r\nOf an abandoned barn, or where a quiet alley \r\nNarrows its waterway and tiptoe weeds \r\nGrow leggy after sunlight, the sky a blue trickle. \r\n\r\nNext, a bomb of exploded songbirds, never ravens, \r\nTheir notes gutted that had drawn feral eyes, \r\nOld souls broken open as rotted ashcans and left \r\nPocking the concrete apron with shotgun blacks, \r\nWhile at their queasy leisure in a patch of sunlight\r\nStray rain-matted cats daintily lick their paws. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Cleaning the Bones<\/h2>\n<p><em>for Linda Johnston Muhlhausen<\/em><\/p>\n<pre>\r\nSlumped at her typewriter as at a toothy skull\r\nIn an elephant graveyard where dry savanna cracks \r\nAnd a wrinkle of valley invites the eye to descend,\r\nThe writer examines her soul like a dentist\r\nPoking the broken white keys til it hurts\r\nAnd prying the hurt out for a good gory look,\r\nThe roots a bit bloody and the roof caved in.\r\nShe tastes the cracked enamel with her pointed tongue,\r\nSucks at the hole in the skull for blue eons\r\nWhere flesh is wet and tender as a jellyfish,\r\nTranslucent and useless as unset glue\u2014 \r\nThe elephants\u2019 ribs a risen house around her\r\nUntil thinking fails and her pink pain returns.\r\nStooping with loupe and a diamonddust drill\r\nShe makes a new tooth out of any old thing:\r\nA pebble, a lost marble, a thumbnail, a screw.\r\nBent like a grandmother washing an infant \r\nShe rolls it left-right, she watches she etches\r\nShe polishes the simulacrum with exquisite skill\r\nAnd screws the new tooth in with tongs and a grimace\r\nIn the place in the skull where the old tooth smiled\r\nPerfectly white and perfectly dead. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>In a Wood<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nStrip me of language that I might hear\r\nThe owlet\u2019s cry climb limb to limb \r\nUncursed by human questioning. \r\n\r\nIn nakedness of hunger or plumed with joy \r\nLet the V-sharp beak declare, \r\nUnhelped by any too-human ears. \r\n\r\nLet every ghostly echo some human word \r\nDisplace;  let the death of a mouse \r\nIn the leaves be the mouse\u2019s death. \r\n\r\nBanish my striving mind, invisible life! \r\nLet sap infuse my veins and a bark enclose \r\nThis too-insistent skin. \r\n\r\nSlowly I leech into the buoyant night  \r\nAs the unknown owlet regains its perch, \r\nOpen eyes diaphanous as moons. \r\n\r\nThe forest, full-tenanted, surrounds us\r\nWith wooden moans, twangs and strange\r\nSighs I myself begin to imitate. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Cycle of Force<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nTadpole grew angry at the slimegreen pond\r\nAnd legged it onto land.\r\n\r\nFrog was wroth with his dry mudbank \r\nAnd humped into the water.\r\n\r\nMaggot in the egg hatched mad at God \r\nAnd helicoptered off the great, dead face. \r\n\r\nTongue abandoned its big-mouth chalice \r\nAnd leapfrogged after the fly.\r\n\r\nMissus laid her suds-bag of eggs, \r\nWindy reeds bent to the ground\u2026.\r\n\r\n\u201cOur pond is mirror-fresh, is cool,\u201d \r\nShe sang, until \r\n\r\nBullfrog sun beat it crucible.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>The Raccoon\u2019s Nose<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe nocturnal raccoon\u2019s a clown of course \r\nWith his merry bandito black butterfly mask \r\nWorking the comic implications of moonlight and trash \r\n\r\nAs he rummages through compost buckets \r\nLike reading a daughter\u2019s diary, yesterday\u2019s dirty coffee \r\nCasting a grainy grit haze over all the spoiled goods. \r\n\r\nHis magician\u2019s hands ferret out wands of hot dogs, \r\nMadcaps of eggshells, the delicious simmering mess \r\nStill to be made of last night\u2019s abandoned dinner! \r\n\r\nAnd that old thief the moon has vampire fangs tonight, \r\nGrinning at his mischief, the quick work of chaos \r\nHands divorced from conscience can make \r\n\r\nAs if, in the minute it takes to return from brushing one\u2019s teeth \r\nA miniature twister had landed on the back porch \r\nAnd pried life\u2019s pasteboard scenery apart at the seams.... \r\n\r\nHe waddles to the hollow half-sun of a grapefruit \r\nAnd sips its pink innards delicately as high tea; so delicately \r\nYou\u2019d swear there was the ghost of a tophat between his ears.\r\n\r\nThe sweep of his ringed tail is spiffy as refrigerated minks, \r\nHis bandit\u2019s mask\u2019s a mere costume for the evening\u2019s masquerade\u2014\r\nRayed starlight hung up in splendid chandeliers above us, \r\n\r\nThe ornate parquet flooring swept dustless for the dance \r\nAs I bow to you through the sliding glass door \r\nAnd you bow to me, too, detaching the purple aperitif \r\n\r\nOf a discarded grape from its wiry dead stem. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Sixpenny Nails<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe paling east belied the hurricane\u2019s arrival\r\nAs if harrying shadows had long since lapsed\r\nThat were only coming up from behind in the west;\r\nAlready a cloudweight of clotted darkness\r\nOwned the rest of the sky, and, in it, lightnings!\r\nAnd water like a tidal wave, a wet apron held\r\nOut before the belly full of aching waters.\r\n\r\nAlready a thin ringing ran through uneasy gutters,\r\nA teetering high-pitched scree that made the dog look up\u2014\r\nA squealing like metal wheels was rolling through the whole house,\r\nAnd the aluminum shutters wouldn\u2019t latch for shit.\r\nWe hurried with nails and plywood where we could,\r\nBeating out the light, keeping ourselves shut in\r\nTo live out the time where we\u2019d creeped safe.\r\n\r\nOur neighbor, a carpenter, helped drive the nails\r\nAs we held up our hands steadying the awkward wood\r\nUntil all that was left was to make coffee and wait\r\nIt out, wait it out, while the carpenter napped \r\nOn the couch.  The wife petted the dog anxiously;\r\nThe dog tilted his ears at the ceaseless screed outside,\r\nMyself quiet as a candle burning down when a long \r\nGust suddenly had us all leaning east with the house, \r\nCounting ourselves and our luck when it finally passed\r\nAnd the roof settled back like a windswept hat.\r\n\r\n\u201cSixpenny nails,\u201d was all the carpenter said, \r\nTurning back to sleep in the appalling weather, \r\nHis shoes mud-knocked clean beneath a chair,\r\nThe house hanging on but just barely.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>First Things<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nFirst, lemon lengths of light trim the gables.\r\n\r\nThe snow is easy still as if still first-fallen, \r\nAll airy whiteness on eyelashes laid \r\nWith the rods of trees black-wet beneath, a river \r\nOf wood roads, paths winter-asleep, though March is making \r\nThe solid ground give out smoky wisps of new grass\u2014\r\nThe cold is best, you decide, swallowing glass,\r\nFirst gasp in a world of limitless ice, limitless slips \r\nAs concrete steps stretch out and the day\u2019s hunt calls.  \r\nAnd all this as the dawn just gets going, the furious orange\r\nRetching up like a swimmer finishing his lunge \r\nHis lionhead shaggy above the pool\u2019s clean edge \r\nRed knuckles hoisting the weighted shoulders\r\nThe dripping face averted as if too horribly strong. \r\n\r\nDawn\u2019s razorback breach has made its showing for today.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Barn Burning<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nA smash of fire ran mad fingers over the skeletal barn. \r\n\r\nStiff-faced horses had raised stone heads how many years, \r\nGreat-grieved Agamemnon masks, old wood masks of Troy, \r\nHankered nosefirst in clunked buckets of morning oats \r\nHow many years?  How many years had dark-cheeked \r\nDignity strapped on a mummer\u2019s gas-mask, \r\nChewing handsful clouts of oats while slow eyes feast \r\nOn dawn\u2019s no-man\u2019s land of rank grass pasturage, \r\nDawn\u2019s fist a misty cauldron in the bolt-hole valley \r\nWhere sun wrestles roadflares all along one edge \r\nIn daily ghostly flameless burning how many years \r\n\r\nKnuckling white the weedy line between sky and earth. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Phalanx House<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nDamp shadows follow you through hairy woods \r\nTrailing\u2014oh, a thousand things\u2014as if a mist \r\nBloodied, a mist made wine, made dark, made night. \r\n\r\nAnd through those shadows push spidery hands \r\nMaking way for some lost face, crowning shoulders, \r\nAs if walking here you were a stranger being born. \r\n\r\nIn the middle of these trees arises a ghostly house \r\nOf grey timber, each plank knotted at its core, \r\nIts fieldstone chimney slipped like a old man\u2019s back. \r\n\r\nHampered daylight fills the tomblike home \r\nWith strands of grey, and shows a battered mattress \r\nWhere teenaged summer nights convene. \r\n\r\nQuiet heat, like a holstered gun, dots forehead \r\nAnd neck\u2026 and starts an itch of wonderment at all \r\nThe echoed life that once raced these halls,\r\n\r\nOr ran barefoot upon the hill, or rolled a hoop, \r\nLong before any long shadow of wood took root \r\nAnd raised up leafy tabernacles, and blotted all. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>People Beating the Fieldgrass<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nEveryone with a stick, or a cane, or an umbrella tightly rolled\r\nIs walking methodically through the fields beating the grass;\r\nDrowning in wild alfalfa, bullgrass, bluestem up to their armpits\r\nTheir voices carrying the lost name like a repeated wave\r\n\r\nSusan Susan Susan Susan \r\n\r\nThey tilt and straighten and walk and cry through the grass,\r\nSwinging wildly at the unmanageable weeds, the everywhere\r\nInterference of green and seed and tears twenty-four hours\r\nHave thrown in their faces as they pace and peer for darkness\r\n\r\nSusan Susan Susan Susan \r\n\r\nFor some shadowy clot of curled being forgotten at the root,\r\nDressed in gingham and bedded down exhausted, or tripped\r\nOn a grey hidden risk bulking blind in omnipresent grass,\r\nSome black current having carried her where no ten year old\r\n\r\nSusan Susan Susan Susan \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<em>\r\nThe moth said: \r\nI am too shy,\r\n Too. \r\nIn love to speak. \r\n<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Beach Dig<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nLook what wampum we have gathered! \r\nHere where we honeymooned all those moons \r\nGone by... shells burning in the sunset.\r\n\r\nAgain this year we walk the wide surfline\u2014\r\nShells scurry to our hooked inlet,\r\nPried by tide and intent into wet pockets.\r\n\r\nI fish a nickel\u2019s-worth of wisdom out \r\nAnd turn your smile into a hook of chuckles,\r\nDigging after delight like digging oysters.\r\n\r\nWe trail the sound\u2019s tideline on the lookout \r\nFor what the year\u2019s vastness has left draggled,\r\nGlints of glass in the endless backwash.\r\n\r\nSuch a wealth of seawrack and stink! \r\nBacks bent like hooks to troll for treasure\r\nWe hold on, hands hooked together.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Love Undid<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nSordid love undid\r\nIts ribbons and buckles\r\n\r\nLeft its pants collapsed\r\nIn prairies of desire;\r\n\r\nWhere buttocks tussled\r\nLove was sunburn\r\n\r\nA red all-over slap\r\nThat cools like a sore tooth.\r\n\r\nLove came roaring\r\nWith its juggler\u2019s chainsaw\r\n\r\nIts hissing hot kisses,\r\nIts tongue of raw fire.\r\n\r\nLove crashed \r\nIts charring stars\r\n\r\nInto your chest and mine,\r\nOur mire of human\r\n\r\nSnicked alight \r\nLike matchsticks.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Wedblocked<\/h2>\n<p><em>two weeks before<\/em><\/p>\n<pre>\r\nBy this point, I thought we\u2019d be gasp-laughing, \r\nThe marriage corvette hitting seventy without a hitch \r\nOur faces wasted with spring sunshine and wild smiles, \r\nThe unrepeatable in-jokes that couples conspire: \r\nMemorizing lewd news to appall old Aunt Ida \r\nAnd zap Uncle Chuck into a champagne spit-take, \r\nOr doodling Acapulco details of our honeymoon\r\nDrolly on napkins at midnight rendezvous.  But,\r\n\r\nWinter snows buried our playful April to the roof! \r\nWe, who\u2019d thought to kindle time \u2019til our May bonfire \r\nA matchstick at a whack!  Frozen roads skid caterers\r\nAnd budgets off track, timetables plowed under\u2014 \r\nCold curses crash, chatter vile links in an icy chain \r\nThat grapnels our nuptials with anvil force, winch- \r\nIng us crippled toward some drooling giant\u2019s \r\nHinged maw, jaws-of-life prized \r\nEndless as a waterfall, awful as passed gas. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Dimwelter<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nIn the dimwelter of evening we met for a swim. \r\n\r\nThe gawp of the lake aping the moon\u2019s smooth light \r\nTook our floating bodies with a silver swallow\r\nAs we swept our smiles filling with pushed water \r\nInto easy depths, trailing wings behind us as we \r\nPaddled and lunged, our hair returned to womb-wet, \r\nYour elbows now and then vivid with drips as a gutter \r\nOverpoured in storm and wind, the cold clean of it \r\nCutting me into pure halves like a new pear, \r\nA pool of oblong moving shadow now, circling \r\nWordless when dim clouds came obscuring the moonbolt\r\nThat had been riveted so brightly above us\u2014 \r\n\r\nThe stars coming singly clear when we stopped. \r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>For the Love of Buttercups<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nFor the love of buttercups in a field of buttercups \r\n\r\nWe take our watery walk slowly in good boots, \r\nGlimpse sparse splatterings of streams here and there \r\nAmid the blat of frogs.  Simmered mists lessen westward \r\nAs day ignites those golden buttercups hard yellow, \r\nAnd hinting love makes way for plain statement\u2014 \r\nAll sepal-soft affection turned ardent seed. \r\nPale tender bulbs survive the flinch of winter here \r\nAnd bring their crayon yellow to another summer \r\n(Keeping blossoms true even in months of floods)\r\nLifting their buttercup\u2019s branching crowns in air \r\nLike fleets of saffron monks on backs of elephants\r\nAs if no other season than their summer ever was, \r\nNo colors worn but their summer\u2019s burning brands,\r\nBlond chalices lapping open around our moving knees\r\nWhere we dodge humped tussocks in old boots \r\nAnd hold old hands like two roots entwined until \r\nSome seeping inner mist arrives, veiling face and eyes \r\n\r\nFor the love of buttercups in a field of buttercups. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Sunflowers<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nWe sat in the burning fields and shared a sunflower. \r\n\r\nTall around us leaned the velveteen cornstalk shafts \r\nOf sunflowers by the mile. Jenny held the fallen god \r\nLike a pie plate in her open lap, the heedless seeds \r\nBlack as tacks, teeming as ticks, getting picked \r\nOne by one between index and thumb, eating their meat \r\nLike smashed bugs with staccato teeth and tongues. \r\nThe sound of the fields was as a cat in a grocery bag, \r\nA papery bigness the dry leaves weaved into canopies \r\nThat frittered the sun\u2014the suns\u2014nodding their lead heads\r\nInto bearable shreds of threaded light and shadow. \r\nSome of the sunflowers were still descending comets, \r\nTheir yellow petals coned into harmless arrows, \r\nTheir grin of seeds still hidden and small as a fist; \r\nOthers, though, gave us the full black lamp treatment: \r\nIntense and downturned as saints at prayer \r\nWatching the sacrifice of their fellow at our hands, \r\nPinching eyots of flesh that dribbled to our lips, \r\nOur raw fingers busy as boll-weevils, our eyes \r\nThemselves going dark as the million feeding seeds \r\nWe ate and wiped antsy on our long blue dungarees, \r\nStanding at last amid a devastated harvest \r\nOf shells and whispering stalks, \r\nSilent with germinating thought\u2014 \r\n\r\nDone for the day that was not done with us. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>The Fox\u2019s Pelt<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nWe woke to your skin on fire, feverous with dream. \r\nBut day was docile, the sky a heating-duct grey \r\nAs you shaved carrots skinless that odd afternoon \r\nA fox ran through the kitchen\u2014on hard scrambling nails \r\nAnd subtle paws, his sharp mate-musk stink sticking \r\nWhere spindle-legs, black-burnt matchsticks \r\nHad passed;  ears alert, nose an arrow, eyes begging-wild\r\nAs a starving child\u2019s, his tail a lit roadflare. \r\nHe shot, disoriented, past you: instantly loud, \r\nPerhaps rabies-mad, like BBs scattered on glass. \r\n\r\nAll nerves, you said he\u2019d run so near his pelt \r\nAirbrushed calves as you peeled\u2014and your face \r\nCarried a strange look into evening after that. \r\nA preoccupation with the map of outside sounds, \r\nHoots and windchimes, whinging dogs, paused you, rapt. \r\nExcept for a pinch of laughter here and there,  \r\nI\u2019d\u2019ve said you\u2019d sent your lover an unanswered text \r\nYou were so otherwhere and otherwise.   \r\n                                       And when \r\nI settled your faux fox pelt around your shoulders \r\nTo escape suburban boredom for the theater, \r\nYou touched the clean fur like a child\u2019s scraped cheek \r\nAnd bit your lip, and pouted in the car, watching \r\nFor some red flash in headlights that never came. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Stars, Tears<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nStretched-out night taps at the tattling sash.\r\n\r\nNight like a dog wants to go for a long stroll,\r\nTugging the cool coiled leash of me to get going\u2014\r\nAnd I go, myself restless and dreamless loping\r\nInto my slip-on shoes, nabbing the worn\r\nWalking stick as the door clicks shut behind me and\r\nNight is everywhere at once like cold raindrops:\r\nOn my skin and in my hair I feel the instant ice\r\nOf high stars;  their frost, their freedom.   And I\r\nLook up as if asked by the minister done with prayer\r\nAnd step onto friendly gravel, and beyond that,\r\nPicking a worn path that crackles through the field\r\nLike wild glazing on a shard of pottery.\r\n\r\nTaking my first breath at last I taste this tear.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Postcoital Olive Grove<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nHere I lie on a shield of dust\r\n\r\nBeneath a black-green dapple of olivetrees,\r\nThe sun in patches alive as fireants\r\nOver my beloved as she snores, sotto voce,\r\nThe wine rolled emptily out of reach\r\nAs steep hills fall away to a scent of hidden seas\r\nAnd my forgotten pipe burns, itching my fingers,\r\nMy teeth fresh and shivery as if smiling,\r\n\r\nThe white plate bare of all but a few grapes.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<em>\r\n     A fire was lit, the wood spat.\r\nRobert Macfarlane\r\n<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Day\u2019s Catch<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nBetween tremendous white acts of clouds \r\nThe sky cleared,\r\nBare planks of an emptied stage. \r\n\r\nThe day is unwritten that would speak there, \r\nAct aloud \r\nInto the blue gape, the sky\u2019s splendid gob of light\r\n\r\nA blue umbrella opening over our knot of fishing boat,\r\nGreen-gunwaled, \r\nWe\u2019d untied into the broad morning stream:\r\n\r\nRainbows ran away from the deeply crooked prow, \r\nUncatchably sailing ahead \r\nOf the painful pant of oars;  those bold, effortful strokes. \r\n\r\nTo the enviously easy sound of the river we gave up \r\nAll sound of words, \r\nWatching blobs of bobbers distort, listening only \r\n\r\nTo the silent howls of fish we hauled wobblingly \r\nOver our knees \r\nTo lie swollen beside our muddy wellingtons. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>River Otters<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nPlay keeps the otter on track for survival, \r\nSweeps her back on her back \r\n                       for the key routines \r\nOf diving for meals, basking for supper. \r\n\r\nShe\u2019s got the alert look \r\n                  of a janitor on the hunt for trash, \r\nher variable mustache never settled \r\n                              beneath her nose \r\n\r\nBut forever twitching and twigging to some \r\nUndiscovered opportunity for fun\u2014\r\nEntering intimately the zippered water\r\nSwat-wheels of paws fanning liquid sunlight\r\nRiding the wide slide \r\n                 of a heavy wave \r\nOr pairing in play \r\nFight midstream, two-eyed pirates \r\nWithout a plank.   \r\n\r\nAn otter\u2019s her own rodeo, \r\n               her laughing lariat \r\nHilariously cast \r\nto capture \r\n    a tragic moon and cinch it into smiles. \r\n\r\nAlways at wrestling rest with water, the otter \r\nLaps the stolid, waterlogged log \r\n                                  eared with fungus \r\nAnd slaps curls of surf \r\n                like a panjandrum \r\n\r\nAs she comes round and round \r\nAnd goes around again, \r\nEasy as leaves in autumn wind. \r\n\r\nShe\u2019s never less than slick, \r\n                   a weight of laughter \r\nOiling her pelt, keeping her \r\n                   slim and wealthy. \r\n\r\nShe\u2019ll eat a fresh-bitten fish like eating a mirror, \r\nEndlessly eager after silver and blood, the good new stink\r\nThat fattens her milk for pups when they come \r\nMewling into the grassy holt under willows\u2014\r\n\r\nBlind naked and crawling longwise to find furred teats, \r\nThey\u2019ll ride their ready mama \r\n                               all night like a raft.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>O Indigo!<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nUp from the bottom  \r\nOf my belling boat, I saw \r\n\r\nSky, only sky. A quick electric \r\nCut pale as paper. \r\n\r\nAround me loured the sounds \r\nOf sky, white whispers \r\n\r\nLike smoke unrolling,  \r\nThe shifting sheets \r\n\r\nOf making a fresh bed. \r\nSuch air! \r\n\r\nUnreeling invisibly over me\u2014 \r\nNothing but indigo, \r\n\r\nOne indigo cube, cut \r\nBy my inward gunwales,  \r\n\r\nMy bolt-hole \r\nUnanchored as a cloud...\r\n\r\nSwiffering west, west, west \r\nAs the stream hisses\r\n\r\nAs my fresh eyes dream\r\nOf only this one\r\n\r\nHuge acre of blue.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Arrival by Water<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe skiff put in with a harsh hush of gravel at the island\u2019s edge. \r\n\r\nNobody noticed the fog\u2019s snug hoodie with the broken woods before us \r\nOpening on the campsite, the ashen eye of the old put-out fire \r\nCentering where we would raise the spider web tents and hunker down \r\nFor a long week of stories, the tipped glint of eyes in a sleeping bag, \r\nDays spent loping about the island\u2019s sandy pines and warped shrubbery \r\nOr reading in the drifting skiff among junkyards of stumps \r\nAnd the loud flap of herons fishing.   \r\n\r\n                            Sparks sang in the campy air \r\nThat first night, casting strange ensigns in the edge of sight \r\nAs we gathered our civilization to a knot of masks hunched \r\nGrimly around the burning socket of earth, the terrible tribute \r\nOf twigs pulled and piled skyward, the orange ingot of log \r\nSacrificed like a length of man clipped and thrown away \r\nWhere the frightwig fire climbed, feeding \r\nOur meaningless stories with death\u2019s spat light. \r\nKathy heaved away into distressed shadow, and Dan \r\nSheared off after her with a joke, their tent argument eventually \r\nShivering with reconciliation as Manny chuckled \u2018Life!\u2019 \r\nThat was the first day. \r\n\r\n                          The water wrinkled like a face \r\nIn front of the prow, and that was the second day. \r\n\r\n                                         Third day in, \r\nWe set out for food more than what the river would give \r\nWillingly to our lines and time out of its silver mouth and \r\nInto ours;  there were small deer and wild pigs scattered \r\nShotgun throughout the tossed wreckage of woods, \r\nAnd we would tackle and prepare one or go hungry \r\nWe swore, shaking on it after the tar of morning coffee. \r\nDan, Manny, and myself, Samuel, headed east to start \r\nOur circuit of the island heading toward a swampy dip \r\nThat attracted birds, since even a duck would serve, \r\nPlucked and picked clean, while Jen and Kathy stayed \r\nTo clear the breakfast char away and order camp, \r\nScoffing at our oaths and waving us away with laughter. \r\n\r\nOnce beyond the distracted clatter of camp, we hushed \r\nInto a pack, Manny taking point as we arrowed into woods, \r\nTuning booted steps to silence as precisely as monks: \r\nNo confusion of intentions invests our steps. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Kitchen Duty<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nSmoke discloses \r\nThe campfire\u2019s claws \r\nRoped close \r\nTo our greasy offal. \r\n\r\nIf life is light \r\nIt grabs such cast-off \r\nDaintily, \r\nChews clawsfuls. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Grasslands<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThere\u2019s less seen, although the seeking is ceaseless. \r\nThe olivey fibrous tough stalks find needles of shadow \r\nEven when orange noon crouches in the valley licking. \r\n\r\nA flotilla of mice could be passing, washed in grasses, \r\nInvisible as whiskers, a rustle in the rough pampas. \r\nA fox, a squirrel, a snake here and there swaying S-like \r\n\r\nAnd still there\u2019s no hissing insistence but endless grass. \r\nLike a paper screen behind which a dancer disrobes, \r\nThe grass seems flat, yet folded, yet flat. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Catfishing<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nMyself flat in the water-mirror, with the hanging jowls\r\nAnd hooded eyes of time, am made rainbow-wavery, irised\r\nBy the river\u2019s uneaseful striving, acres of stained glass \r\nFinned with strafing rain and clubbed morning light\r\nWhere hidden fish in seeming millions jump blind\r\nAfter duplicitous raindrops instinct craves into insects\r\nUntil brawny brass clouds  are bundled off the map\r\nAnd my baited line laces whippets \r\n                             in water\u2019s renewed calm,\r\nBegging for fish-morsels to bite and crimp\r\nFighting jaws on a bended hook joyed deep\r\nInto a catfish\u2019s prow of snout, barb and shaft deep,\r\nPulled mastered home by fisted reel, my miniature\r\nMill-wheel of undoing.\r\n\r\n                     At length I clambered ashore,\r\nAt length felt the knife\u2019s finesse deftly\r\nEnter without flicker or spur the sudden\r\nBlood guts spreading gushed for thumbs\r\nPeeling the eatable fish to its depths.\r\n\r\nIts heart-spigot spat incessantly, stressfully red\r\nUntil my steel puncture found its bubble, and red\r\nWaters ran away from the wound with a dying flush\r\nAs flesh lapsed;  lungs and bladder;  intestine, crop and liver\u2014\r\nFood for flies on the cracked, caked-dirt bank,\r\nThe sudden blood a Y-river to trip-up cascaded ants \r\nBusily bulked at the stream of life falling stinky there,\r\nA snarl of amber snakes dropped drowned from clouds,\r\nMy green waders holding me whole in eely skin.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Deadened River<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nHere among the dead\r\nSun\u2019s  hard discards \r\nLies an excrement \r\nOf mud unleavened\r\n\r\nWhere the river leaves \r\nOff lapping, leaping,\r\nFor August heaviness\u2014\r\nLethargic shallows that trap\r\n\r\nThe trespasser\u2019s shoe, \r\nMark him mid-thigh \r\nWith handprints of mud\r\nAs he labors for the grey shale \r\n\r\nShore, the vivid crevasse \r\nThrough which, slipshod, he entered \r\nThis endless kingdom of mud\r\nGlistening and viscid, \r\n\r\nLacquered tomb of frogs \r\nAnd pizzicato flies attending \r\nThe deathbed of glittering fish\r\nGreenly gasping \r\n\r\nSlashed gills amid a tinder\r\nOf leftover rainbows.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Underworld Turtles<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nThe slow, snapping, fatal hook-faces \r\nWithdraw beneath peaty murk, guinness-dowdy stout; \r\nStellae of stumps jut up their ancient wood turtlenecks, \r\nInterrupting radar ripples the ancient heads send out\u2014\r\nLong antediluvian thoughts, green only in sap, in blood \r\nAs old water uncoils to flatness. \r\n\r\nDaisy-dainty mossflowers crown the right-hand stump, \r\nDeeply ambiguous as dew, yellow-white as sunnyside eggs. \r\n\r\nI sit stiff in the splinter canoe until turtles return \r\nBlipping the surface like rain beginning,  \r\n                             eye drill-holes black as the underworld \r\nIn ratty light that skirts the island\u2019s belt of mulchy decay. \r\nThey arrive bald as ambassadors, bold as monarchs\r\nFrom their dipped-in-oil underkingdom, leaf plantation\r\nOf soft coffee grit that finds the cracks in graves.\r\nTo what side of experience are they wet stepping stones? \r\n\r\nII\r\nCornea-bulbed backs rise darkly coated as frying pans,\r\nStub flippers studded with badger-cleats fanned out \r\nWound-strike ready, forever extended as a garden tool\r\nBeneath the camouflage of river\u2014its mirror deceits\r\nPart and parcel of the shadow-play turtles stage.\r\n\r\nPoked heads are wizened critics\u2019 barbs, brainlessly sharp.\r\nWill they sort the worthy and unworthy, like Anubis?\r\nWhen winter steps to the river, fetching its cape of ice, \r\nThese creatures bury themselves hind-first\r\nIn muskrat burrows, settle-in in lump-mud debris;\r\nThey lodge naked beneath rotted eye-arches of logs,\r\nCozied dim in the underworld under summer\u2019s business\u2014\r\nOccasionally guessably visible below thick mid-season ice, \r\nThey roll out of hiding like heavy wheels of revelation churning,\r\nSwimming slow and white as ghosts \r\n                           beneath the flying skaters\u2019 feet.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Meeting a Deer<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nA scumbled scuttle, a tamped fusion of hooves \r\nRattles my attention from a slouchy doze \r\nAslant a twig-burst hawthorn were I\u2019d found \r\nAn old oblong of sunlight to coffin in an hour, \r\nWhile noon leans onward like a runner sketching  \r\nLight-trails toward a dash of yellow ribbon: here\r\nA deer, disconsolate, nuzzles sweetgum leaves, \r\nEating green stars steadily unto Kingdom Come;\r\nI see before me fine-grained flecks of  flank \r\nLike a hazy TV left on long past the last show\u2026. \r\n\r\nHer head is shy and broadly-spaded as a snake\u2019s, \r\nThe leaflike ears alert, the one dark eye I can see \r\nPotent as an eclipse\u2014umplummable, purplish  \r\nDepthless blacks, while her lips work the sweetgum \r\nAnd I wait without motion, floating raftless\r\nAnd buoyant in my Dead Sea nap\u2014so close I inhabit \r\nThe trembling huff of her nostrils, sour and warm, \r\nHer limber length trim as an unpulled scull\r\nAt rest for this waste minute tide-bereft,\r\nWeaving and unweaving in the woods\u2019 waves. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<h2>Moon Owl<\/h2>\n<pre>\r\nA snowy owl puts himself alone in a room with the moon.\r\n\r\nHe is silver as a Christmas basket, and the moon hangs silver too\r\nHigh up in trees\u2019 intricate netting, ribbing the night absences.\r\nThey present, from a certain oblique angle beneath them,\r\nA pair of wary skulls absolute in their terrible whiteness:\r\nDeath and his hungry buddy divine retribution, perhaps.\r\nBoth of them fly at us in the engineered silence of ages\r\nOn wings of light like devouring angels, gowned and ornate.\r\nWitness them, the feathered one and the bald one up there:\r\nBoth of them honeymooning or playing space chess or whatever\r\n\r\nAlone in a room together that we call heaven.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A book of poems Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown] amazon.com\/author\/gregglory gregglory.com Wild Places Once all wilderness was innocence. Later, all wilderness was sin. What does it say about wilderness, that it could be both sin and innocence\u2014a space of condemnation and reprieve\u2014at once? What does it say about us, limber interpreters of vastness? Every day <a href='https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/thistle-wins-by-gregg-glory\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1746],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thistle-wins","category-1746-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5592","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=5592"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7369,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5592\/revisions\/7369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}