the moon over my shoulder
is already half-lit
i turn my hand palm-up
it fills with starlight
flying squirrels scold
in an ethereal key
i’m sitting beneath their
favorite mother oak
i take a deep breath
of autumn soil fragrance
a whitetail buck grunts
more as if in pain than in lust
there’s a thunder of hooves
then nothing
a dead leaf drops
into my hand
an eye that takes
two weeks to open
how to sleep through that
unwavering gaze
round as an infant
indifferent as a cane toad
to some appearance
of planetary conjunction
much less any hypothetical
end of life on earth
where the other eye
now dreams storms
the meadow at dawn
gives birth to ghosts:
slow dancers of fog
beneath a crescent moon
that’s just been deserted
by its entourage of stars
the goldenrod’s dark gold
mellows to yellow
a whole 30-acre bowl of it
between wooded ridges
where the sun comes
as a parishioner
among the monarchs
and the green darners
and later the lopper
with its steel grin
full moonlight at half strength
due to rain
a slow and seemingly deliberate
tapping on the roof
one of the last warm
end-of-summer nights
katydids singing this is it
this is it this is it
this night with its singular pelage
will never come again
let sleep go on without you
like a zombie apocalypse
flying squirrels open
the dark sails of their bodies
a spring peeper calls three times
in defiance of the season
sky face says meh
to the white noise
of our anti
bodies of work
squeezing whole lives
into a few hours before sleep
while six-legged leaves
chant half the night
sky face acquires
a round cloud mouth
the moonlight denies
ever knowing the moon
the lives we’re missing bloat like corpses
as species dwindle
sky face is just the void
with better branding
the same moon
in everyone’s phone
fireflies
To go for a walk in the woods during the day is to participate in a fantasy of knowing through seeing. The mysterious unknown is pushed back, engendering the desire to keep walking just to see what’s around the next bend. At night, all such illusions fall away. The forest we’ve just walked through retains its essential unknowability. Without darkness, the very possibility of the wild becomes endangered.
From off in the darkness, the sound of a porcupine clacking its teeth. Against what threat, I wonder?
It goes on and on. Somebody doesn’t have much sense.
a porcupine puts
one foot in
As the crescent moon ripples and breaks apart, the mountaintop pool suddenly seems cavernous, its tree reflections trailing into the abyss. I stand to leave and the illusion passes. A bat nearly the same shade of darkness as the forest careens in and out of vision. The short path to the woods’ edge seems to have doubled in length, but this of course is another illusion. As is the bobcat quality of that snarl I just heard from the spruce grove.
The night makes everything grow: half-seen, fuzzy outlines dissolve, and the darkness itself becomes the only upward limit on size. Names and identities we wear by day become as loose-fitting as nightgowns or pajamas.
Limbs against the snow, outlined with more snow. Treetops no longer canopies but the bare nets of need. Their no-longer-rare caresses and collisions in the winter wind. The moans of the ice-bound. How tormented they’d be if they hadn’t retreated to the underworld, that silken matrix of rootlets and hyphae, to trade fermented memories of sunlight for the bones of a mouse.
winter den
a slow leak of breath
growing needles
snowy meadow
seedhead bending into
its own pit
I lost my sense of smell for just two days. When it came back, the first odor I noticed was soil, which still surprises me this time of year. When I was a kid, the only time the temperature rose above freezing in January was for a few days of warm weather toward the end of the month, a little false spring we called January Thaw.
white clippings
from my haircut
winter garden
Rachel went back to work after a ten-day self-quarantine. She had what might’ve been the common cold, though five of the other people who looked after the same special-needs person tested positive for Covid. That’s the hell of it, the not knowing whether one might be infectious or immune.
winter
afternoon moon
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
snowflakes
on my bald head
tapping woodpecker
subnivean
I tunnel through the day
half awake
Groundhog Day
the former coal town living
off a shadow
cabin fever
today’s potato flaky
as old wood
meltwater pool
the way my reflection
keeps shivering
cold moon