Winter Farms

I saw you from the highway
(maybe you saw my car,
an expensive bubble of different
air heated to sixty-eight,
screaming past at seventy-four:
all engine noise, aerodynamics,
synthetic rubber on asphalt)—
you paused
on the farmhouse porch,
sized up the winter chill, then
turning to your barn, I saw
your resolute march
into snow and frozen air,
the highway one dull roar
behind you nearby,
an audience taking in
your pastoral silhouettes.

December 2020

We stare at the brown starless sky
wishing for something new—not
new to humankind, but new to us:
an unexpected conversation, some
experience of another human’s way,
some turn of phrase or thought
we hadn’t had before. Anyway, we stare
and the brown sky is silent,
like our minds, like our lost encounters,
saying nothing back to us. 
Our hearts will beat like this
for years, craving that next thrill
of the unforeseen: because,
as I heard once in a phone call
with a distant friend, time passes
evenly, but with no marks of Newness
seems to slip whole weeks & years
into a blank and sightless void, so that
thinking back, it seems time cheated us 
running swiftly toward our ends
when all we can recall is some
cold, unfeeling, brown & starless sky.

December 2020

When silence finally descends
I like to wonder how it ends
—not the silence, which will be
ripped away unceremoniously,
but all of it: what’s in mind,
what’s in store, what’s behind.
Do we find triumph? Or pretend
at least a victory-flavored blend
of mixed results, death and life,
sometimes deep, sometimes trite?
Or in the end, will all I grimly find
be meaningless, unless it rhymed?






December 2020

Envy in the Land of Salvage

Do not review the catalog
and mourn it’s not you or yours
—don’t mourn the photograph—
but see the things around you,
the wagon with one wheel,
the door on its last hinge,
broken skis and fishing poles:
imagine how sleds could be,
cascading down slate hills, or
what adventures await the salvage
of a stubborn creativity.

December 2020

Flick! Crackle.
It’s been a while since I wrote poetry, he wrote
in his mind. Drag. He imagined a wry smile
on his face—
“Oh my gaaaawd! Would you look at him!”
From another dark corner of his skull,
“Shakespeare in turmoil! Come look!—“
broken off in a cackle. Whatever; that one alw—
“Now he’s dismissing us! Look at the sneeeer!!
What a pretentious shit! Haaaa!” and the screeching
sound of laughter, bitter and mirthless.
Drag. The jackal’s not all wrong, he thought.
He never used to notice how the smoke
stinks; it smells bad. I don’t like it,
he observed to himself. Drag.

Chasing the noise of the jackal was a bleak silence,
like a faceless man. Or maybe it was, actually
—faceless thoughts, shapeless and meaningless.
Can a single syllable with no meaning
even exist, in your head? Can a tuneless sound?
Drag. “Always creating, always clawing, reaching,
forcing his smell, his strange flavor, on everything—
for what?! You think you’re better than us?”
Started as sniveling—ended with a scream. Drag.
For some reason, in his mind’s eye, there is a low wall
and a nicely trimmed green hedge, just to the right
of me—if I looked over, I would see it, he thinks,
knowing he wouldn’t—and it just seems 
adult, responsible, grown up, to have that.
He wonders briefly whose house he is at, to have
such a careful guardian, who trims the hedges, but
he’s careful not to look, and prove it isn’t there.
Drag. The jackal has a point. Look at this disaster.
Why force strange flavors on a listless world?
Whatever. Drag. So it goes; sometimes life is like that.
Drop. Step. Gingerly pick up—I’ll have to wash
my hands, beard, clothes, for the smell, he thinks.
Toss!

December 2020