From Word To Word

I wrote this poem after I dream that stayed with me very powerfully for several days.  I will not try to interpret it.

Naked

I have stood naked atop the city,
its towers of babel reaching toward the unpronounceable,
and I have held a glass in my hand,
with wine like a mouthful of time,
and I have looked down upon a thousand street lamps
a thousand flickering screens,
and I have waited for someone to recognize my nakedness,
to no avail.

This poem is for my wife, who gets too few of them.

Market Girl

I dreamt I saw a market girl,
I dark-eyed apple seller girl,
Shy ruler of the autumn dawn,
Of frost-etched windowpanes that shone
Their lace-light on the still-dark street,
Of mulling spices, strange and sweet,
And of the applecart propped door,
Through which I looked to see her more.

My wife has been home for a few days,  giving me some opportunity to write truly at leisure, which is when I usually find myself writing poetry, not when I am working on writing, but when I am merely writing.  Here is something that I wrote yesterday.

Light

Through the afternoon window,
More cloud-silver than sun-gold,
Tracing lines on my water glass,
Quivering and refracted,
Light,
In the flesh,
The incarnation of a setting sun.

I have been gardening most of the past few days, so I have had little time to write anything, but the gist of this came to me as I was working, and I thought I would share it.

Like Nothing that Can Be

There is no truer thing
Than leaf occluded light,
Shivering, speckled, gold,
Like living, liquid stars,
Like weightless, green-gold waves,
Like ever-waking dreams,
Like nothing that can be.

I know that this poem is hardly appropriate given the season, but I sometimes come across old things in my notebooks and have the urge to finish them, and so here it is, whether you like it or not: a poem about a warm, summer rain posted in the middle of December.

The Finest of Rains

The breeze is stumbling and unsteady,
drunken, pleasantly drunken,
and it carries the lightest and finest of rains,
pin-pricks of coolness in the warm evening,
not enough, even, to quiet the crickets.

The Gulls

The ragged clouds of gulls come over the trees,
frayed and straggling, black against a grey sky,
chasing the last fragments of the sun,
and each is tethered to the next by stray wings,
in two or threes, clutches, small sprays of shadow
that spring from the occluding forest,
that are swallowed by the indefinite brightness of the horizon,
like bits of ash returning to the fire that first flung them
into the high and cooling air of a still un-starred sky.

The poems that I most need to be poems are always the ones that disappoint me most, and I very much need this poem to be a poem, not for myself but for another, and I only hope that he is less dissatisfied with it than I am.

The Tree Trembles

The tree trembles beneath the axe’s blow,
But its strength is sound, and its roots are deep,
And its heartwood is true, and it stands firm,
Stands a moment more proudly than it did,
Because it soon must fall, because the bright axe
Has whispered to it from the whetstone’s edge
That its time approaches, but still it stands,
Not to defy, but to fall from its height.

These True Things

Of these true things God made the North:
Of rock and water, trees and sky;
All else comes falsely, even earth,
And like the earth we thinly lie
Upon its face, constrained by birth
To cling in wonder til we die.

I am on Manitoulin island for Easter weekend, and I have been spending some time in the woods down at what our family calls “the camp” on Carter Bay.  This poem was written there.

A Vertical Sky

The trees make the sky stand vertical,
the birches,
the cedars,
the spruces,
the balsams,
vertical and reaching.
They rupture its vastness,
and trouble its expanse,
and urge it still higher
to the terror of its beyond.

This poem is for my wife, because I do not write her nearly enough poetry, and because she deserves poetry if anyone does.

First Sky of August

I have always thought you loveliest
When I catch you unaware, and you stand,
Half-turned and still, your eyes on something else,
Something quite apart from me, some bright thing,
Like the book on the thrift store shelf that day
When you, for me, were first transfigured;
Like the apples, red and gold in the light
Of a morning dimmed market, halo lit;
And like the sun, redder and golder still,
And sinking through our first sky of August.