CONVERSATION WITH A CREEK

I will slap your face
I said
and the water said
go right ahead.

I’ll beat you with a stick
I said
and the water said
go right ahead.

I will stomp on you
I said
and the water said
go right ahead.

I’ll cut you with my knife
I said
and the water said
go right ahead.

I will nail you in a box
I said
and the water said
go right ahead

as it glittered
in a zillion squints
of dancing glints
along its pebbly bed.

I may be daft
but that was when
I think I heard
the water laugh.
.
.
conversation-with-a-creek

MAPLE YELLOW, MAPLE RED

Maple yellow, maple red, I see
the killing splendor of your canopy
outside my window as I lie abed
gathering this morning’s go-ahead,
whispering this small apostrophe—

how gracefully you ride time’s tyranny
and know exactly how to be a tree,
rubrics never read, sermons unsaid,
maple yellow, maple red.

Soon you will die, to some degree,
turn prickly gray as colors flee;
but you’ll grow back the brights you shed.
This time next year, I may be dead
while you, most likely once again, may be
maple yellow, maple red.
.
.
MAPLE YELLOW, MAPLE RED

AUTUMN IN THE SKY

“…gathering swallows twitter in the sky.”
—John Keats, “To Autumn”
.

Come autumn, gathering swallows twitter in the sky;
their song portends oncoming bitter from the sky.

Chickadees hop amid the rose hips ‘til
in pursuit of blue they flitter toward the sky.

Lingering gladioli lean along the fence
aiming one last blossom-spitter at the sky.

Indian summer, you old scoundrel, heartbreak
mocker of the stars, you are a counterfeiter of the sky.

Earlier darkness doesn’t faze the ever-blinking
radio red eye of the transmitter in the sky.

Electronics do not know this is the melancholy
season, though they sense a jitter in the sky.

It is the season when things die, return to haunt
in guises ravelled by cloud-knitters in the sky.

When I am old…am I already old?…then I
will head, shed all this earthly litter, for the sky.

O hold me tight tonight, you cold, you bright
immutable, you ever-fickle glitter in the sky.
.
.
AUTUMN IN THE SKY

AMONG OTHER THINGS

Among other things
the forsythia blooms
indoors, in water,
just as one presumes–
its tiny yellow openings
burst into day stars
forcing spring
into the winter gloom.

But now the branches
lately cut, are doomed
never to know again
how golden plumes might
ride together on a wind
might bow and swing
among other things.

Separation marks them
for a loamy tomb where
dry sticks end,
sink, are consumed.
Or so it seems, except
for a remembering

a homesickness for sun
an urge toward wings
and what it means to be
a glow in the brume
among other things.

. . AMONG OTHER THINGS

BY THE ANDROSCOGGIN

The Androscoggin flows, cliff-sheltered,
hidden by a thickness of great pointed firs,
so we cannot see it from our windows
though we know it’s there. Sometimes we hear

after a freakish torrent of hard rain
its rushing over rocks—the ones we hop
when crossing—and we’re sidelined for awhile.

The local ducks, deer, foxes, skunks
don’t seem to mind; they let the river
have it’s way—grow wider, deeper,

curving slippery as silk over the falls,
roaring down to swirls of sudsy turbulence
then calming to black pools of mystery.

Only the hand that winds the clock of thought,
the sleepless eyes that worry out the window,
know an urge to push the river toward the sea,

while among the firs, small bright eyes
caught on the dark like stars fallen to earth,
watch, and don’t agree or disagree.
.
.

PRELUDE TO A NECESSARY SONG

Are they trying to be songs,
those small urges nudging the heart
toward the throat, wanting to live on air?

Very like songs they are,
fragments of song, ideas for a song
swimming upstream to a belonging

with mute swans on the clear
mirror of a mountain lake
gliding toward the inevitable.

But what if they’re off-key?
Sung wrong?  What indeed.
Try to remember what

someone looking for the lost chord
midway up a mountain in Tibet
said, and which I pass along:

a bird does not sing
because it has an answer;
it sings because it has a song.

………………………
Prelude to a Necessary Song