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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.