Midday heat
the slow downward spiral
of a leaf
black butterfly
wings still damp
from the tomb
cooling breeze
the black-throated green warbler’s
other song
Contemplative poems
Contemplative poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.
Blueberrying: four haiku
sawgrass
the crickets fall silent
when the wind blows
blueberry bog
the soft clink of car keys
in my pocket
blue star
at the end of each berry
filling the bucket
picking berries
against the winter
a fly on my lip
* * *
box turtle
dignified despite the mushroom
on his chin
far pasture
the slow rearrangement
of cows
watering hole
the sky’s reflection in each
deep hoof print
Gummibärchen
what bear
medicine is this
lumpy and vague
as a Zuni fetish stone
chewable as
an eraser
what distant deeps
or skies encapsulated
in what furnace etc.
childhood candy
grown strange
grown up into so much
that’s unbearable
about the bare
necessities of life
Epizoochory
spiderweb
on my glasses
name that tune
lost dog
enchanter’s nightshade burs
in its ears
tick-trefoil reversing
in mid-air
white spears
of black cohosh
an insomniac firefly
waterfall that only sings
when the stream’s a trickle
children’s cries
the holiday sky empty
but for a vulture
June moon
the same moon
in everyone’s phone
fireflies
* * *
ancient seabed
a sudden roar
from the quarry
higher pitched
than my memory
first cicada
which tree
will be today’s gnomon
great grey slug
I just found these coral fungi less than 50 feet from my front porch. Why don’t I ever go back here? I muttered as I crouched down to take a shot.
Then I stood up and saw all the poison ivy. That’d be the reason.
Slug Life
invasive slug
the wood pewee bending
his one note
cool morning
the sun catches a spider
patching holes
Separation
Mind the gap they said
and I didn’t. There’s
a storm wind but
no storm. Children
play in the distance
or maybe fight. Don’t
mind me I murmur to a deer
trotting past while I type
this on my phone standing
still as a tree at dusk
just vibrating a little
from a Swainson’s thrush
on his yearly trip north.
I’m mindful that everything
human in this hollow
comes from the gap
Off spring
Standing outside my front door on this rainy night is the closest thing to a son or daughter I’ll ever have: an eastern red cedar tree, which I found and transplanted when it was one or two years old back in 1993, and has since grown into a bit of a monster, towering over the house. The old place in Maine where we lived till I was five had a number of juniper bushes in the former pasture, where I used to play a lot, and I think that’s what appealed to me about having a closely related species right by the door. And sure, I knew it would turn into a tree rather than a bush, but I still thought it would stay on the small side. It hasn’t — much to the delight of roosting songbirds. I have to prune branches that rub against the roof, but still, on stormy nights, I hear it thump, thump, thumping against the house.
Psychogeology
the stone is no home
for solemnity
the stone must be open
to time and ruin
approaching the ground
with no earhole
green and slow
like a ship of fools
Landscape with scolding wren
through gaps in the hills
a river of fog
and me here on this wren’s powerline right-of-way
eating lowbush blueberries
Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem
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