01 Sunday Apr 2018
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Spring arrives like forgiveness,
A plump bluebird bouncing
Along the railing of our deck,
The cry of killdeer nesting
Among buttercups and grass widow.
The earth is full of robins
And toad sound, dormant lawns
Starting to green and grow,
And something like wonder
Taking root in this wide-open world.
20 Tuesday Mar 2018
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Tags
aspen, Aspen Trees, Bird Poem, Bird Poems, Birds, First Day of Spring, Loneliness, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Robin, solstice, Spring, Winter, Winter poem
I think the aspen is happy today,
The way the robin perched
On its bare branches.
The skin of her feet,
The skin of that branch,
One warm body pulsing blood,
The other pulsing with spring sap.
To be touched after so long,
As your buds begin to break
The surface of what separates:
Your ability to drink of the sun,
And that long and naked loneliness.
23 Friday Dec 2016
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There’s a rule among birds,
If it’s singing, it can’t be killing,
Which may, or may not, be true,
Except for the family of plump chickadees,
Who wintered beneath our cedar arch.
With their black caps and gray-backed wings,
They flitted from rail, to pan, to chair, to deck,
To aspen perch, peeking in at us,
Until I plucked my first A minor–
The 3rd and 5th string,
A melancholy chord found in most songs,
Even the chickadees’, it turns out,
When they hear you sing.
06 Monday Oct 2014
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Tags
Abandoned Nests, Aging, Alfalfa, Autumn, Autumn Poems, Barns, Bird Nests, Bird Poems, Horses, Mud Nests, Old Men, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Quail, Quail Poems
Morning comes late,
And the autumn sun trembles
through Aspen arms.
Didn’t you say,
If the sun didn’t rise,
Or set, there’d be no time?
Yesterday, the eggs were cold,
In a nest of mud, and hay,
And strands from the pinto’s mane;
Such that, even the barn
Closes in on silence.
The family of cats, hunkered down
Behind fresh stacks of alfalfa,
Grow fat on a sudden flush of quail,
And the sun sets sooner now.
At last night’s fire,
You were shocked
At what the old man wasn’t afraid to say.
Later, you laughed at what he’d said,
Talked of the freedom of age,
And the benign closing of our souls.
First try:
The Autumn sun rises late,
Through the arms of Aspen,
Trembling in slow, cool wind.
Second Try:
The late-rising, Autumn sun,
Trembles through the Aspen’s arms,
In a slow, cool wind.
13 Wednesday Aug 2014
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Tags
Bird Poem, Bird Poems, Bird Poetry, Bits, Canada Geese, Death Poems, Dreams, God, Life, Mental Health, Poem, Poems, Robin Williams, Suicide, Suicide Poetry, Thoughts
The storm came, like so many storms,
More dark, more swift, more rain.
Before that, the first migration,
Canada Geese in mid-August clouds.
I wonder if nature follows news
Or news follows nature.
We quiver with uncertainty,
Our frail choices to live boldly.
Etta says, We get on our knees,
Pray for help, sometimes we gotta,
Just help ourselves.
But it’s hard missing,
Each one gone too early,
Disappeared into our dreams.
He’s an old man, he’s crying,
It scares me. Am I scared
Or sad, or terrified?
He’s an old man, he’s crying.
Says his brother stole his–
He says, his inheritance.
He’s an old man, for god’s sake.
Does it ever get easier?
And when did I start to envy geese?
September fifteenth, two thousand one.
When they fly by, I escape.
When they honk, I worship.
I think that’s what I wish I was–
As buoyed, as certain, as free.
This is what he said,
Before he was gone,
But only in their dreams
can men be truly free.
It was always thus
and always thus will be.
Why are we so afraid of leaving?
It’s much worse to be left.
We don’t know; we’ll never know.
The storm came, faster than we knew.
It did things, storms don’t usually do.
01 Tuesday Jul 2014
Posted in Uncategorized
The past is but a second,
A rotation of our body under the sun,
A few wet steps through grass,
On a path lit by a full moon.
So it seems,
The beautiful singing boy was there,
And then he was not.
What was left was a silent post
And a rafter full of chubby fledglings
Trying to find their way out of the barn.
13 Friday Jun 2014
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Tags
Barn Poems, Bird Poem, Bird Poems, Bird Poetry, Birds, Poems, Poetry
There is a barn sparrow
Who continually sings
One clear note.
I hear him every day
Above all the other bird sound:
From the deck of the house,
From the garden,
From the dirt road.
And, below where he sits on the fence,
Two cats criss-cross
Back and forth, leaving the barn,
Returning to the barn,
One half-hearted jump
From the beautiful singing boy.
But that’s not the most beautiful thing,
This is: He sings to lure us away
From their nest inside,
Built into a light socket above a stall,
A nest filled with the newly hatched,
And their mama tucked with them,
Her protective wing wrapped round,
Keeping them hushed.
I wanted to tell him I knew,
That I saw him flying away from it,
Landing on one wall,
Then the next, and the next,
Singing and tempting me slowly
To the outside fence,
But when I got close enough,
He flew away,
And when I followed,
He flew even further,
Until I was so far from the barn,
I was no longer a threat.
He gave me one last look as he perched,
Tipping with the wind,
On a scraggly branch of Toadflax,
Then he flew back to his fence post,
And continued his song.
03 Thursday Apr 2014
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Tags
Every spring,
When the birds come back,
The cats disappear,
And I wonder if they’re dead
Or gone wild,
Chasing magpies and robins
Until they’re so far from home
They either don’t know
Or don’t care to return.
There are cats
Who come back to me in dreams,
And I wonder if this means they’re alive.
There are theories of dreams,
That they’re infinite
Pieces of our perceptions,
Some hidden, some obvious,
But jumbled together as we sleep
And experience sweet things
We never thought we knew,
Or, experience horror
We didn’t know we could imagine.
I wonder which is real,
If the cats in my dreams
Are as much themselves
As any of us, living, can be,
And if we are all, always, chasing birds,
Wandering further and further
From some home.
