Along The Way

The tree leans
away from the wind,
an invisible, permanent path.

I have been gone
forever, the years condensed
into something deceptively simple,

the past.
In the garden,
yellow blooms.

The day is at the door.
You can’t help
but walk right into it.


Black Spring

Black spring
butterflies, vultures
in the wind, silently arc
above the fire
break.  A tree recently fallen,
roots up.

No murder mystery.
In the gulag, on Solovetsky,
they tied prisoners to a post
in a mosquito swarm.
Pushed others down
flights of endless
wooden stairs.

Today
I’ll take
my sorrow
to go.
A pair of geese call through
the canyon–

flying upriver, reversing
the current–
where the river narrows and slows,
a man wading in,
panning for gold.

Lullaby

The river stills,
clear where the bend is.
Sun sidles up the hillside,
light and dark.

Oh make of me a riverbed,
laid open, spread wide,
not so much in licentiousness
as regard

for whatever
outweighed the river.
Sedimentary.
I hope

you can take me
like this.
There’s no other way
left.