New Poems
Still Life


We have slipped by here, scarcely noticed,
for generations; the trees we planted,
oak and birch and eucalyptus,

scarce reached our knees those days, now they rise
stooping amongst scattered stars, against
turquoise deepening to blue-pink, emerald, cobalt;

we know –  after the old folks with their hearth-music
abandoned us – generations are layered beneath, and still
the young hare leaps in the joy of morningflush

while the mismatched mistlethrush will cock
her speckled chest into the northern breeze:
as it was, we say, in the beginning.

I will turn soon into the broth of dreams,
blue-pink, emerald, cobalt, a blade of grass
of being, but for now I hold my hand

against the sky and watch a star
between my fingers, see the webbed flesh, feel the blood
pulsing, and listen to the soft sigh lingering.

                     
for Michael Schmidt

July 2008
The Nest


A dark world, its stench and cramp, its scramble,
up in the acute angle of the gable wall,
the jutting roof in its occlusion, dumping dark
on dark; and then the beaks, yellow and livid
and big almost as the bone-fluff bodies, the blind
struggling for space, the sudden yawp for worm
to be stuffed in the gawping maws from above; until
there came a death of sorts, the adults urging, and the young
swift was out and tumbling, sickeningly, down; but
something within its being bloomed and there, suddenly,
was the whole and unforeseeable earth and unlimited sky,
the brash exultant rush of its body in instant mastery
of the elements, those open meadows of the sky,
those cloud-suffused blue fields, blue pasture-lands.

August 2008