Execution
At some point in my late teens, I took over from my dad as chief executioner. I think it bothered me slightly less than it bothered him, a life-long pacifist.
a V of swans
my fingers still sticky
with chicken blood
Contemplative poems
Contemplative poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.
Arsonism
fire is my flag
if nothing matters
there being nothing
to follow as much as
this necessary rose
what hands
open with more
unparticular generousness
Truncated
In the news, there’s a report that COVID-19 antibodies might not persist for more than a few weeks, and therefore that we can expect no herd immunity. Thinking about this, I barely hear the black-and-white warbler wheezing or the wood-pewee’s melancholy melisma. But then, from around the bend, a deer comes bounding straight towards me, doubtless trying to escape her nimbus of flies. I freeze. She stops 50 feet away and stares, moving her head from side to side for a better view. Human, or a tall stump? She makes up her mind to step warily around me. And I am a stump. I barely remember having my head in the clouds.
whose road is this
the tree snake’s
rootless flow
In the Fullness of Time
Six weeks after I planted potatoes, they are finally all up, the latest leaves no bigger than the ears of the mice I was sure had dug up and eaten them, especially after a series of holes appeared in each hill. But it’s been unusually cold this spring, and sprouts were simply taking their time. Our neighbors had urged patience, and they were right.
All this waiting to see what happens with the pandemic would be hard to bear if I didn’t also have something to wait for: a garden growing and changing day by day now, so that time doesn’t merely pass like some lifeless assembly line, but unfolds, ramifies, flourishes, bears fruit.
even as
I pull weeds my beard
keeps on growing
evening garden
Tadpool
I didn’t go to bars or restaurants all that often, but I still miss them. Longing is all about the unattainable, isn’t it? I often find myself out restlessly walking around the mountain instead.
so much more
than one can hear
hermit thrush
I like walking at dusk because it is then that the buzzing stops. I don’t mind the whine of a mosquito, but as long as I can remember, I’ve been bothered by flies. Too many of them and my nose starts to itch uncontrollably, I don’t know why. And nothing is more horrifying than some dead animal heaving with maggots.
ephemeral pond
raccoon footprints fill in
with tadpoles
Out of Whack
It’s not every year we get snow in dogwood season. This particular year, the wild weather simply adds to the impression that the world is completely out of whack.
spiderweb
catching snowflakes
their little spikes
Marooned in our homes, tempers fray. We wonder how long this will go on, worry about finances and food shortages. I watch a pair of scarlet tanagers—treetop birds—reduced to feeding near the ground and foraging for invertebrates in the creek.
redder
than our open mouths
tanager
But spring is always a puzzle: the innumerable ways that spikiness blossoms and leaves us.
Spring Evening
For anyone in the rural U.S., power outages are a way of life, so one of the most surprising things about the pandemic so far is that the lights have stayed on. I stand on the ridgetop as darkness falls, gazing at a very bright Venus high in the sky; below that, a sliver of moon, the black bulk of the Allegheny Front, and then the usual display of interstate exit lights, street lights and house lights. And in a town of 5000, however Appalachian, there must be at least a few Muslim families breaking their Ramadan fast.
spring evening
scent
of a backyard grill
8:30 and already most traffic has stopped. Way off down the ridge I hear the first whip-poor-will.
night forest
a glowworm’s
slow blink
Putting a Garden In
Putting a garden in so often entails putting wildlife out. You develop an adversarial relationship with nature, fencing, trapping, shooting, poisoning, getting a guard dog… It’s this sad reality that many years ago turned me against what had been the reigning passion of my youth.
onion bed
pulling out
wild onions
Quarantine Walk
quarantine walk
stopping at the sound
of a jet
I can’t stop marveling at how quiet it’s become under lockdown. In normal times I find the close horizons of this narrow hollow in the hills a bit claustrophobic, but now that there’s so much less noise echoing around in it from adjacent highways, the nearby quarry, and factories and businesses in town, it feels more spacious. A pair of local Canada geese fly over at dusk and I hold my breath, listening to their wingbeats. I no longer envy animals that live underground their superior soundproofing.
last week’s rain
that hush
in the moss
Pandemic Time
Kept apart by the pandemic — my wife in London, me in the mountains of Pennsylvania — we connect each day through video conferencing software. She tells me of a scary incident earlier in the day when a man spat at her, narrowly missing her face, as they passed on bicycles. She watched in astonishment as he went on spitting: at a bystander and then at a runner, fortunately also missing both, before he disappeared around the corner like a figure out of some urban legend — “the mad plague carrier.”
pandemic time
stopping the car to watch
a pair of ducks
* * *
poetry festival
someone says the lake
isn’t a lake
in wild–
flower beds now
only the cosmos
200 years
after Keats’ ode
autumn persists
churchyard labyrinth
zeroing in
on the X
where the dead
are said to sleep
my autumn face
skyline
* * *
building site
the four-square mounds
of unearthed earth
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