time

a channel on the way to misery bay

Perhaps the Leviathan is Invisible as it Enters the Channel

For a long time 
in my young life 
I gazed upon landscape paintings 
or landscape photography 
or nature poetry and thought - 
So what?

But isn't that like beholding 
angels threading light and saying - 
Pass the butter?

to crane

contemplating the nature of an empty field
a chorus of cranes derrick and jib by
leaving me to wonder on the nature of an empty field

when i put my ear to the earth i heard a distant bird

listening

listening harder

and listening harder, again

stunned by being

the hand can sense it
     mud and marl

the eye can weigh it
     loquacious curve of light

what is made

a chorus of chaos, a holy order, ii

under the canopy

beyond the trees, protected from the clock of autumn sun, ferns yet persist as yellow.

they shine out at me with a canary's pulse. something in me shines back at them in return, glistening, ambrosial, accruing, and common like honey.

the distance between all things narrows.

time and consequence, nest

 Life Draws a Tree by Roberto Juarroz (translated by W. S. Merwin)

Life draws a tree
and death draws another one.
Life draws a nest
and death copies it.
Life draws a bird
to live in the nest
and right away death
draws another bird.
A hand that draws nothing
wanders among the drawings
and at times moves one of them.
For example:
a bird of life
occupies death's nest
on the tree that life drew.
Other times
the hand that draws nothing
blots out one drawing of the series.
For example:
the tree of death
holds the nest of death,
but there's no bird in it.
And other times
the hand that draws nothing
itself changes
into an extra image
in the shape of the bird,
in the shape of a tree,
in the shape of a nest.
And then, only then,
nothing's missing and nothing's left over.
For example:
two birds
occupy life's nest
in death's tree.
Or life's tree
holds two nests
with only one bird in them.
Or a single bird
lives in the one nest
on the tree of life
and the tree of death.

sentinels

between two points

Summer Crosses The Water

First she is a far ways off
and it takes a good long while to focus,
to understand what's coming into view,
what's located like a dot between those two
anchored and distant islands.

Then she's in front of you, a boat,
filled with sundries and ice-cubed sodas
and women with thin straps coddling
off their shoulders, soft skinned, and thwack -
a stinging unrestful zestful desire, slipping,
slipping, slipping effortlessly through azure water.

Then she's advanced (holy hell, were you asleep?),
the hollowed hull of a cargo ship,
a sepulcher you can't hold or reach,
slipping, slipping, slipping again
around the harbour's bluff,
an empty drum, a lost host, a wraith.

meditation on what a flower is, gladiolus ii

meditation on what a flower is, gladiolus, i

images in water

the tree grows from the shoreline
and the trunk is thrust out upon the water

is this a photograph of desire? if so, whose desire?
or is desire, the lustful knot, undone in this?

is this image two dimensional?

how many dimensions is desire composed of?
how many leagues deep?

the snare of bulbous roots
casts forth its image
which does not complete itself

*

images in water

my mother is sitting in her easy chair with her oxygen
making circles with her fingers along the rise of each of its arms

she used to do this at lunchtime while sitting at the table with her novels
using the long fingers on one hand to encircle her chin, as she devoured the exotic mysteries

then later, as her eyes worsened, while we talked
she'd hold one arm and encircle her other elbow

i think about being at the river and tossing in stones
the circles widening until they swallow my image as i hang over the bridge

i look a little like my mother

elegy

i dream a feather

a certain concretion of order

from Hachadura by Robert Bringhurst

I

There is nothing like the razor 
edge of air, another

like the tongued pebbles, syllables
of sea-wind and sea-color and

a nothing and a nothing like the salt
hide drying inward, eating

in through the underbelly of bone,
the grain

of the sea-eaten iron, and the open
lattice of the wave.

There is nothing, moreover,
at which Eurytos never
quite arrives, tallying
the dust with the four-finger
abacus
unsheathed from the flesh of his hand.

Suppose, therefore, a certain
concretion of order,

unstable or at any rate in motion, but a certain
concretion of order inherent in one
in the innumerable
forms of such a number. Therefore:

darkness under the sunrise,
darkness in the hollow of the hand;

inside the spine the darkness, the darkness
simmering in the glands;

the rumpled blade of darkness which is
lodged in every fissure of the brain;

the membrane
of the darkness which is always

interposed
between two surfaces when they close.

II

The bird is the color of gunmetal
in sunlight, but it is midnight;
the bird the color of gunmetal
in sunlight is flying
under the moon.

There is a point at which
meridians are knotted
into nothing and a region
into which meridians fray and intertwine,
but not like mooring lines; they
fray like the leading and trailing edges
of wings, running from nothingness
to muscle and strung from the muscle back again.

Listen: the sounds are the sounds of meridians
trilling, meridians drawn to produce
the illusion of plectrum, tuning pegs and a frame,
or perhaps to produce Elijah's
audition: the hide
of the silence curing,
tanning,
tightening into the wind.

Or the sounds are the sounds of the air opening
up over the beak and closing over the vane,
opening over the unmoving cargo slung
between the spine and the talon,
slung between the wingbone and the brain.

III

It is for nothing, yes, 
this manicuring, barbering, this
shaving of the blade.

Nothing: that is that the edge should come
to nothing as continuously 
and cleanly and completely as it can.

And the instruction 
is given, therefore, 
to the archer, sharpening

the blood and straightening
the vein: the same instruction
that is given to the harper:

Tap.
Strum the muscle.
Breathe.

And come to nothing.

meditation on what a flower is, black eyed susan, i

"Centripetal Force and a Lull in the Stratosphere"
 
 

to achieve grounding

meditation on what a flower is, tiger lilies, iv

meditation on what a flower is, tiger lilies, iii

meditation on what a flower is, tiger lilies, ii

meditation on what a flower is, tiger lilies, i

meditation on what a flower is, wild rose, iii

meditation on what a flower is, wild rose, ii

meditation on what a flower is, wild rose, i

To Pablo Neruda In Tamlaghtduff by Seamus Heaney

Niall FizDuff brought a jar
of crab apple jelly
made from crabs off the tree
that grew at Duff's Corner—
still grows at Duff's Corner—
a tree I never once saw
with crab apples on it.

Contrary, unflowery
sky-whisk and bristle, more
twig-fret than fruit-fort,
crabbed
as crabbed could be—
that was the tree
I remembered.

But then—
O my Pablo of earthlife—
when I tasted the stuff
it was freshets and orbs.
My eyes were on stalks,
I was back in an old
rutted cart road, making
the rounds of the district, breasting
its foxgloves, smelling
cow-parsley and nettles, all
of high summer's smoulder
under our own tree ascendant
in Tamlaghtduff,
its crab-hoard and—yes,
in pure hindsight—corona
of gold.
           For now,
O my home truth Neruda,
round-faced as the crowd
at the crossroads, with your eyes
I see it, now taste-bud
and tear-duct melt down
and I spread the jelly on thick
as if there were no tomorrow.

a chorus of chaos, a holy order, i

meditation on what a flower is, lady's slipper iii

meditation on what a flower is, lady's slipper ii

meditation on what a flower is, lady's slipper i

meditation on what a flower is, poppy iii

meditation on what a flower is, poppy ii

meditation on what a flower is, poppy i

spring, last week

stars in the late day sun

two

6 pm april, from the bridge

Wet Evening In April

The birds sang in the wet trees
And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
      The melancholy.

by Patrick Kavanagh

trust