Emergence
A groundhog comes out of her hole
and begins to gather bundles
of dried grass.
Harlequin ladybirds
emerge from the side of the house
with a burning thirst
and dive onto the snow,
where they suck and stumble
and come to a frozen halt.
Contemplative poems
Contemplative poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.
Vessels
The perfect pits
in the snow around
the lowbush blueberry stems
awaken in me
the old urge to collect—a museum
of pots and bronzes,
and in the plaza,
a fountain that accommodates
every coin-sized absence…
Winter gardener
I was land-hungry in my youth.
In the summer I turned soil
and in winter hoped for snow—
a Platonic kind of field,
rich in solitude as any desert
and as free of weeds,
the leafless rose in the yard
alone with its snarl
of barbed canes.
Downsizing
Day by day
the shadows are dwindling,
assuming more realistic shapes,
like the ambitions of a man
in middle age.
The snow hardens underfoot.
I hear the first
mourning dove call of the year:
desire in a minor key.
March
A four-pronged twig tumbled by wind
has left the oddest tracks
in the snow, no two alike.
The fox, by contrast,
has walked more than a mile
in her own, earlier footprints,
leaving a single set
of blurred tracks with toes
pointing in both directions.
Opening
The footprint of the collapsed house
seems hardly big enough
for a closet,
let alone three floors
of moldering furniture
and typewriters full of dead beetles.
Up in the woods, a beech tree
has filled the opening beside it
with outstretched limbs.
How to tell the woodpeckers
If it calls often,
it’s a hairy woodpecker,
less often: a downy,
never: an ivory-billed.
Each year the ground grows simpler
and the sky more complex.
Right over there,
in a hollow locust tree,
a hive of wild bees used to sleep.
Burning the tissues
In a snow-bound ring of stones,
I am burning all the tissues
from my recent cold.
The sun beats down. Fallen twigs
and leaves are melting themselves
into form-fitting graves.
A flat wing of ash floats up
and hangs in the air
like a famous last word.
Reanimation
A few degrees above freezing,
and already the first gnats
have come back to life.
Insects have mastered
the most immaculate lifelessness,
deader than any corpse:
even ice
with its many knives
never gets a chance to grow.
Head cold
The house is pinned
under heavy snow.
My head fills with mucus.
Icy limbs strain
to reach the ground,
alternately melting and freezing.
I drip in the noon-time glare.
Let me be replenished
in nightly increments.
Deep snow
In all this blankness,
a squirrel finds the precise spot
it buried a nut.
Breaking trail with snowshoes,
I choose to believe
I’m half-floating, not half-sinking.
Clumps of snow sail off the trees,
making a random scatter
of oblong prints.
On the Way to Santiago, 1978
I remember the Moorkiller’s
stone horse in Logroño,
its terrible phallus.
Near the steps that pilgrims
once bloodied with their knees,
the jolly lacemaker.
We yield the road
to sheep, a bicycle race,
old men bowling in the afternoon.
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