Snowy Owl in Connecticut
I enter memory,
as I entered the woods long ago,
cracking the ice-laced earth,
seeking my voice,
what does it mean to see,
to take the mind’s tangle
and make it familiar to foot,
open to airs,
to find a path’s or poem’s double texture
that brings one deeper in the wild,
but closer to refuge,
that fuses sound with light,
that salvages from shadow
winter’s shimmered gaze
on beech leaves’ yellow skins,
sycamores’ port-wine stains,
hornbeams’ Chinese lantern shells,
catkins void of their green fruit,
bittersweet on gray branch,
rouge upon a corpse.
This life that lives in death,
my scientist father would endorse,
all decay will yield to birth,
on this we could agree.
From a cedar’s
green cabinet, it came —
a snowy owl,
rowing wingbeats,
round head in crystal air,
yellow eyes that caught the sun,
a ghost sailing in blue sky —
I was, still am, undone.
He could not take my word for it,
would not share my vision,
seated in his book-lined study,
blanketed in reason.
For many years,
its afterimage traced a phantom
in a thicket of vague thoughts,
more myth than memory.
Now, two winters
since my father’s death,
I finally see it clearly,
see its silver sweep,
its dappled feathers,
white as the rabbi’s robes
on the holiest of days,
lofting my prayers,
white as pages
laid before my pen,
an irruption of the possible,
the wingbeat of my words.
I see, with a predator’s sight,
The cruelty of choice – how sometimes
we must release our reason
for others to be free.
Published in Sixfold, Winter 2022
Bushwhacking
After walking months in local streets,
I started to see the patches of woods
at the end of cul-de-sacs
where the palimpsest of paths remain,
not marked, but stillborn veins
spidering through vines and branch.
I could see enough to take a plunge,
took pride in edging by swamp and slime,
found a connecting route
to the churchyard parking lot,
and the spine of fence that lines
the Fairview cemetery.
I later learned that I’d rambled Mooney’s Woods,
where sixty years ago, children short-cut
through morning haze to Braeburn School,
loading their P.F. Fliers and Keds
with stowaway nettles, their treads
embossed with lozenges of pebbles and dirt,
chucking crab apples as they kicked leaves
and turned up stones.
This New Year’s Day,
I’m thinking of yesterday’s walk,
dinner after with friends,
of how I didn’t light the Shabbat candles
and say the sabbath prayers,
the first Friday in a long time
that I had not,
I’m thinking I could light them now,
but really can’t have back
the previous night’s moment of release,
the evening’s unspoken prayers.
This makes me think of an old man in a quiet house,
on Pleasant or Whitman or Wells,
seated in an upholstered chair by lamp light,
remembering Mooney’s Woods,
the wake a stick made as he
traced his name in the narrow brook,
and watched it float into the dusk.
Now I offer this resolve,
that we not look back and dream the trail we lost,
but rather bushwhack forward,
make our way through moonlit woods
to find those places ringed with holy light,
not visible from any paths we’ve known.
Published in Winter Glimmerings, 2024, Orenaug Mountain Publishing Co.
Rainstorm in Linekin and Burley Preserves, East Boothbay, Maine
The knock, knock of the cedar plank
that lifts and depresses beneath our boots,
the engine’s putter on the Damariscotta,
muted by a widening dome
first nibbling at the balsam fir,
then sending fluttered sheets to fold back ferns,
a tympany beats against the lichened ledge;
a fluid drone within our ears
hisses at our very soul,
enclosed within a caul of sound,
we are subject to a heartbeat
larger than our own,
beholden to the rushing water
coursing through all veins.
To appear in In Common Things, Shanti Arts Pub. Co.