Poetry

On Michaelmas (with a phrase from Rilke)

Landscape unsheathed

from summer’s haze:

a place both known

and unknown

as late September’s

slow flame flares.

Spectral yellows

and the first red flush

sparking across

the maples. I walk

to watch

of the changes—

what moves

from the outside in.

Lord, it is time

to succumb

to the new season,

to imagine it speaks

in the space where I

spoke before—

the voice grown ragged,

thinned into a syllable.

I walk and I notice

the dark and disjointed

alleyways

in this sinking canal town

lit by leaf-patterns

sparked against

gray drizzle. Lord,

it is time: summer

was too long,

and the new season

disorients me

into a new frequency.

I walk and watch

as winter’s bare altar

is prepared.

View from a Backroad in Upstate New York

On a steep, green hill

all the tombstones are falling

away from their names.

Keepsake

The friend who betrayed

me, I hold no malice

toward him, remembering when

we drove the backroads

of Western Massachusetts,

and wild turkeys, barely lit by what red

remained of a sunset, crossed the road

and we stopped to let them pass.

We stopped talking, after hours

of talk, and watched those ghosts,

those turkey-shaped shadows,

slowly cross a narrow road

into woods where it was already night.

Matins

From a darkness most

palpable before first light,

in the tall pine by

my bedroom window, a bird

chants a line as clear as glass.

First Sunday of Advent

Inexplicably, the scent of jasmine

threads the night air. Cold air.

Closer now to winter than the depths of fall.

Nothing’s in bloom but a dumpster

overflowing, and a few chimneys—

it must be the woodsmoke that thins

into imagined jasmine. Walking home,

streetlights dim, I see as far as I can think.

And here the season begins, in the dark,

waiting for the Word to emerge

like the amber glow

in a window at the end of the road.

Northern Tracks

Ferns flash dark,

chafe train windows

relieved by graffiti:

faded white runes

scrawled on

an underpass slant.

Barbed-wire fence

wrapped around

cracked concrete,

crabgrass, green

plastic bags

ballooning light.

A sign reads

SPECIAL METALS

as we coast into

a ghost town—

half a ghost,

at least, lingering.

Every window

in every building

broken—one

with a branch

lanced into it.

Tree and house

fused, as if

attached

to the same

decaying root

system. A freight

train passes

in the opposite

direction, loaded

with fertilizer:

green and white

sacks stacked and

blurred into blue

that looks

like memory,

a memory

barely there,

washed out—

still enough

to sting. How

sight stings when

things scroll

at this speed;

particulars

particlized.

Yellow sweep

of brown,

of black,

of summer

that hasn’t

released into

fall. First

day of fall,

today—

muggy and

bright. But

the air’s

hollow edge

foreshadows

October. Now

the car’s

flanked by

factories

in pieces

weeds and

abandoned

mattresses

cinch together.

It’s true: Nothing’s

uninhabited.

Nothing goes un-

reclaimed. Red

leaves radiate

in dense brush

bordering woods.

Red sticks

to my peripheral

vision, stains it,

while highway

streaks horizon:

red striations

thread the glare.

Slow, close

to a station.

Algae skirts

a brick wall’s

bent reflection

where pond

meets mud,

knotted brush,

roots buckled

aboveground.

The view opens—

opening completely

to the Connecticut

River; the surface

wrinkling what’s

left of the day.