The Cow Turned its Head (So Wait On Life)

Around the bend, while we chased sunlight
I will remember always the last pasture  
Where three cows sat unaware of anything much spectacular in this dark world
Certainly not, by God, the burning down of earth and sky
Like hope collapsing to endless density, cold and quiet

I waved my camera, quick as I could, fixing its fixtures to take in the world, frame and shutters ready
But it would not work, despite the perfection of orange above me, because  
The damn cow closest us was content at eating grass
And there’s nothing sweet about a bovine ass  
(It’s a cheap rhyme, but there, I’ve said it, I couldn’t let it pass) 
In the center of the frame  
And the other two so far turned, were helpless to help me, as the sky turned dark and the seconds burned  

But, 
at the last moment, that cow most close to us—who knows why, God alone— 
Turned its head, sighing or eyeing me, 
I believe he flipped his tail, too, as if to say, “Yeah, I see you" 
And that image of his face made everything else take its place, stand ready, and say “Cheese!”—the sky, the trees, the holy grace  
As not three cow hides but rather three beautiful beasts  
Filled the center of the frame, and one, a perfect quiz upon his face, was an angel to all the rest, as I clicked away 

He, my new friend, quick as cows can move,  
Settled back down to herb and plate, all done
But the sky was through, anyway, as things need to find their boring, brooding pace again

I knew, though, for that moment, that his turning seemed to say, “Be present, wait on life, things will look your way" 
And I could not have loved him more
So grateful for the photo, which sits framed now, on my desk,
And much more for the metaphor  

Driving with My Daughter as Sunset, in a New Place

The sky is a saddle on the horizon
And my daughter is fighting sleep in the back seat as we drive through hills formed so long ago that you just have to ignore how small we are in the expanse of things
That we are kings, rather—now glad explorers newly finding this ring of road,
Blazing trails on pavement

The stars blink on, revealing the void always there, the never-ending night
The ocean we always sail, the sky,
As we chase the purple clouds of sunset,
The orange leather of last light

She is new to this world (give or take four years), pure and perfect
She doesn’t have the words yet, even in waking day,
To say full what she thinks (of course, what year ever grants us that, complete?)
And what she feels is still a churning sea, a geyser, a quiet lake
Always being discovered, sometimes surprising her
All this water in the world, around and in and through us

You can see the look on her face when she has no words
Like tensile hands just learning to touch
Trying to pick a grain of sand from dust

Before the end of this day’s world, and before words,
In the embrace of a hilltop on which we pause, as on a crest of wave,
Before speeding gladly down into the bottom, where the night is formed more fully—
More sure the dark there, and pure
Together, we have no words, just wonder
As the next hill looms before us like a great, breaking wave
Of perfect quiet
 

Rite of Passage in a Small Town

My aunt told me that my cousin, for something fun to do in this small town,
Would ride the square
"What’s that?" I said, as if I were in Rome pointing to a statue
"Ride the square, you know…get in a truck and ride around it" 
Then she laughed, and I was in on the joke 

There are rites of passage which blind the participants
They are drawn inexorably, like the swallows of Capistrano,  
Like those salmon jumping upstream to spawn  
Like me at my high school graduation growing a goatee of eleven hairs, so spare and sparse
I alone, exulting in my strength, was blind to the sad statement I made 

Little birds, you see, do not despise their strength
And we all flex whatever muscles we have 

"So they just ride and…what?" 
"Stare at each other, mostly" 
I nodded

Another rite of passage, saying
"Stare at me and dare me to prove I’m something"
This makes sense to me
With so much mad fear in the world that "I’m nothing,”  
It’s better to punch something and prove you're there
Better to feel pain than insane fear 

Not so bad, this rite of passage in a small town  
And really, pretty much the same as anywhere and everywhere, and anytime
The world one great town square, around which we ride with wary eyes

Diner

She hung the saddest sign on the highway:
“Open for business, even on Christmas”

Inside the shoebox diner
She served him coffee,
And a fresh slice of pie— 
Her greatness
The one true excellence of her life
That, and the beauty of her eyes

When he reached out and patted her thigh
She only smiled
“Harmless,” she sighed,
Her chest rising
Against the faded pink creases
Fraying beneath her nametag

An hour later, as the bright Buick bulbs
Lit the gravel like a child’s flashlight,
And then the rock wall, and them the empty blackness of asphalt
There were whispers all along the highway
That burned out, like candles, into silence
As the evening came and went
As the night swept in, thick as fever,
The desert canyons moist with rarest dew
The indigo of fading blue,
With its endless beauty and false strength,
Passing like the angel of death
Into the west

Sometimes Death is Necessary

The celebration feels like birds landing on my open hands
But always flying off
Like trimming a bonsai tree with shears just too small
It’s hard to get my heart around it all

Christmas comes blustery and red
With visions of sugarplums plump in our heads
But a day clothed in pastel?
And we are surrounded by so much spring
That the mystery is almost drowned out by our over-seeing and yet, our not believing that
The day that turns to night will turn to day again 

But then I remember that
We pruned our rose-bushes two months ago
And that became its own Easter
I thought we killed them, but
The holy hush—not three days mind, you—but six, seven weeks
Turned them all to burning bushes
And it was too much metaphor
Life, life on every side, orange and red and white
The resurrection and the life

We are destined to walk, if we will, as he once walked,
In the cool of a garden
Up a long, lonely trail
Into the perfect sacrifice of love which keeps whispering,
“Sometimes death is necessary,
Keep walking, still”

Opening Day

The new year as a new babe is a bit tired
But I do like the idea of an old man facing death well and death that goes up in confetti
So sure, let’s go with tried and true clichés; they’ve paid their dues:

In its young days, being raised right
The year smelled leather, began to shape the form of ball and, most important of all,
Formed the memory to mark its life, the association distilled to one smell—
Leather and cut grass

And if January first was the day of birth, last month the year became mature
Took the car out, got its heart broken underneath the football stands, 
Found itself at a bonfire, making eyes across the smoke,
Tried its first illicit act

The year left home, too, in its rusted car, full of stuff,
To become a scholar, to run the halls of wisdom
Before it runs the bases 

And now, thank God, having tasted heartache,
No heart can come broken to Opening Day,
When hackneyed hope springs eternal
And the year is suddenly reborn
No hearts broken at 0-0
When the smell of leather and cut grass removes all the sting of coming loss

There is, if we are ever lucky and blessed, the joy of union beyond ourselves
With something that transcends our mortal frames
And what great irony: we transcend within them, in their prowess and their power
In this, the best work, of filling the earth and subduing it, on perfect grass
And white lines running towards the bliss beyond

With popcorn, with peanuts, with dumb smiles
Which is to say, with hope
On opening day 

The Place Where God Already Is

"Listen to the rain, we have so few nights to enjoy rain,”
I said, lying in bed with my wife, having read a book about how Christianity is subversive,
and that we should use cloth diapers on our babies and shop only at co-ops
And maybe this is true, or some of it, 
But I had no energy for the imagination of it
Not even guilt, just too tired to try anything but listening to the rain
When my wife said, 
“You know what I pray when I dance?”
All my thoughts hid from her, “No,” I said. “What?”
“Lord, give me this dance. Give me this one dance.”
I squeezed her leg, because it made sense to me
Somehow, the mystery is: 
All we do is enter into the place where God already is
the dance, the rain, the tired bed

No Poems Today I, II, III

No Poems Today I

I have no poem in me today

I’m aware it’s either ironic or lying that I’m writing
But sometimes the soul just needs to say, "I’ve got nothing,"
And learn that it’s okay

The sun will come up again tomorrow
And lean into us with rays, like words, that warm
To help us realize, it’s never much about us, anyway
Just the dance of light jumping between every living being
And, come to it, every rock and dust and slumbered thing
Which still write a few words, in their quiet, and throws them, like paper into flames,
Into the dance of fire
Where what’s burned, crossing through, is refined, reproved, renewed
And stands there, across the river, a fully formed Phoenix
In the world to come

No Poems Today II

I guess the fear is we know someday, it won’t
The sun, I mean—come up and all that

But for now, my friend has left town, and my birthday's gone,
And I spent so much energy running around, my soul has pooped out and said, “enough”
Like a jalopy on route 66
We are like circles which, running into happiness, running into sorrow, grow tired and
have to sit once again before the great silence

But then, "Don’t try to wring from me any words," my soul said,
Your brain will judge them all as trite, if you try
And you know the drill:  
You’ll think what you find is never true, that your young energy just deceives you

I don’t have a poem in me, though they remain all around,
I must simply sit and say, "the waves come in, the waves come out
Let’s hope a new tide rolls about"
(See, that rhymed
...I tried)

No Poems Today III

A good substitute for truth is rhythm and a line in time and two words
That stare at each other, from across a line
But this moment won’t yield to cheap tricks

After all, I had a moment which now I can’t remember
Can’t recall with rhymes, like a magician calling a hidden card forth,
But it was poetry

If I can just find and pull the string of it, like a line of hankies from my sleeve,
I could write a poem
But all I can remember is, it was something about how you laughed and smiled
And shook your head while you read your book, a world being born inside your brain,
And me standing in the doorway, an unseen shadow, shaking my head and smiling in my turn
A world turning, like a kaleidoscope, inside me 

From George on his Deathbed

O, God, I leave this story
And I don’t want to go
And lose this pageantry of sight,
And above all sound
The notes of symphonies
Tightly wound and worn
Like a woman’s wedding gown
And the music of nighttime
And birds at day

The smell of summer, too
And ripened fruit
And honeysuckle root
I weep, but not from fear
Only loss
I want to see the story end
I want to dance its final spin

So help me go
There is another story
I’ve been told, and I know—
beyond those feeble witnesses—
That it is so
And the colors there are brighter
Than a thousand here
And its music will melt me
While I will revel in being wax

Still, I can’t see, if pain is gone,
How joy will stand
Or how a pear will taste as sweet
If fruit won’t rot
Or how a stolen day could be as dear
When theft is made dumb
By endless time

But these mysteries, I leave to you
I’ve learned to trust
I know you will see it through
O, God, into that void I go
Knowing this is not the end

And as I leave her...
This I can’t bear to say
(It rips my heart away)…
Let her know our life was sweeter
Than any autumn scent that drenched me
Any summer spring that quenched me
And though we trust it comes again
This is still the brutal end
And meet for tears and loss

But now, heart and courage
Unknown spring still stands
So let me grieve purely
Not as one who is afraid
But as one who loses
And has the strength to cry
With no pretense nor pretending
Even if this is no end

When I Was Young in the Mountains

Actually, I never lived in the mountains
But the brand’s the thing

I was young, of course, we all were
And startled
By the light of this green world

I lived by meadows, that’s true enough
But you’d hardly call the hill a mount

It was good for sliding down, though
I can still feel the ice freezing my hands

It cut me like a dagger
The winter would rip your skin

And in the cutting
Something was let in:

You knew you were alive then
With blood dripping down

You didn’t know you’d always be chasing
Ever after
Something to make you feel the same way

Something as true as that racing pain
You could stay just one step, one slide, ahead of

If pain’s the tutor of the soul
His truth, at least, is easy to learn:
“This is real,” he says
“This means something and matters”

And if you know that, you can hold all things—
Like water’s held in a bowl—
And then you can let it all go

When I was young in the mountains
I learned all I’d need to know

But it wasn’t long ‘til I moved to the town
And things move on from thing to thing

Worse, people will become things
And if you let that winter happen

Well, there’s no spring behind
Nothing coming to redeem it

And when the singing’s gone,
What’s left?  Just standing in line

Keeping your head down
Running ‘round and ‘round

Trying to get what’s next
Trying to not get ground up

Because that’s life
And what life becomes

But when I was young in the mountains?
I was the king of the land

Hands bleeding, the whole world in front of me
Some pain that said, “Don’t get numb, kid,”
Teaching me

I just didn’t know how numb a pain can be
Couldn’t know such realities

When I was spinning in joy
The winter cracking my lungs open

The pain teaching me that to feel
Is what’s real, even if it’s hell

And then, after that winter
The spring coming with so much sap
The smell of green would take your hand

Make all good and bright inside you
Renewing the land, and you with it

For years now, words have slipped from me
Beneath this longing that can’t be laid in words

To slip from this place
To slip from this, the unreal
Where all is numbed and tame and plain

Back to that hill
That I can slide down
Where I can find again that letting in

That letting go that holds you
And lets you hold it

Your hands frozen
Your soul, unzipped, alive,
Shaken and unshaken

Your heart quaking
For how real it all is
And how much it means
The pain of everything meaning everything
Its sting speaking, being, revealing
Everything

On the Grabbing of the Check

I was startled and started at the slamming palm of the gentleman—
Well given the context, perhaps I should just say man—
As he grabbed the check, and his friend said, “Damn,” and smiled
The friend’s cup still settling, disheveled by the tremor of the man's masculinity
His chest pushed out just an inch further now, beneath his grin
His virility in hand, not a carcass brought back to camp,
But a piece of paper, which still signifies some strength 

The Maori, to show their virility, dance the kapa haka
Pounding the ground with such fierce testosterone
The frenzy of energy is a behemoth charging through all the channels of heart,
So desperate, like all of us, to put this power and prowess somewhere
To stand beneath the bright stars and defy our dusty lot
And the awful incongruity of so much longing and so much strength
Destined for a long, slow fade
Which, in our youth, it always seems, we can outrun, or outplay 

I thought, too, sitting across from my friend, above my Eggs Benedict,
Of the Masai drinking milk and cow’s blood and alcohol, before dancing and being circumcised
And later, on my computer, I discovered Vanuatu land diving
And all the ways to prove that we are men

But first, I sat across from another,
At about the distance of Doc and Wyatt at the O.K. Corral
As the nice waitress with the plastered smile said, “Anything else?”
And we said no, wondering who was more the warrior, and who was fastest on the draw 

Now A Car Hurtles Through Space

What about this car in space thing? 
My wife said to me as I read poetry and we both procrastinated on putting our minds to sleep
And it’s true, I guess: a billionaire put a car into space, heading to Mars with a mannequin clutching at the wheel, hell-bent upon the deep
No shotgun rider needed, either, the great vacuum enough protection for the race 

Oh yes, I heard about that, I said, intent on figuring out what on earth this poem is about
Though, somewhere above me, an electric car is hurtling through the atoms, 
And in Tokyo, a man is slamming down his empty whiskey glass, trying to drown out how very insensible all this desire is, burning under cold, unseeing stars which, it really seems, should see and do something about it 

His palm slamming down is like the ignition of a rocket, which sends a payload into space
Then an unmanned car becomes a jester’s grin, sailing above the world
And two fingers, metaphorically lifting from the wheel, flip two birds into the void 

I sense all this, inchoately, with words that will only come later, as I am sitting trying to figure out what on earth this poem is about
But for the moment, I lay next to a beautiful woman, with no energy even to do what comes naturally
Energy only to take all this in stride, and marvel that there is no strength to be amazed
After all, after a while you realize, there are miracles everywhere
And we are kids at a zoo who, by sunset, have seen enough, for there will be more miracles tomorrow
Like the perfect comfort of this cold pillow, and cold hands on a warm back, 
As we all hurtle through empty space 

A Spider in the Shower

I did not see the spider in the shower until I turned and faced the wall
I saw him, then, scrambling up the tile, like waiting for a shoe to fall

He was a doomed bystander,
A pedestrian running from the wave, in some midnight B-movie disaster, screaming without a sound
A step ahead of the steam and heat, on gangly feet

He was a thin thing, too, and awkward
Running on such spindly legs, he betrayed physics, like a cartoon whose scampering feet never touch the ground

Not a Daddy Long Legs, but hopefully carrying some such silly name,
(Or a scientist somewhere should be hanged)
Not, to the point, one of those inky, hairy, thickened things, with mandibles to maim
Which, I confess, have made me scream
(A man-like scream, but nonetheless a scream)

And so I had pity, thinking what a miracle he is
And all these creatures beneath our feet
And this one, finding a corner of the shower to hole up and hide in
Praying Godzilla will pass him by

A decent rendering of ourselves, in scale, come to it
Ourselves in point, just one step ahead—
Always scrambling from some wave, some heat, some steam
Wondering about the great giant of pain, crashing dumbly about us, singing a stupid song
As we scramble for some safe place
To rest our weary feet

Beneath the Anger, Always Sorrow

In The Perfect Storm, there is a moment when the actors are transfixed metaphors
Staring at a patch of sunset beyond the fray until
Seeing the wave that would push them away from sun, back into the darkest day
George Clooney, bearded, brawny, bruised by life, curses the storm that will not let them go

In your sorrow, my friend, you were such a sailor
Not on film or page but in flesh and blood, looking at the pink horizon of hope beyond the waves
For a moment, your anger abated and there, beyond the black and gray of it, you saw the pain
Touched it, felt the throat-tightening grimace in the underwater vault of it, 
Always kept at bay by the energy you expend wrestling that Leviathan away
Beneath such thick skin

The pink sky ahead was the way out of it
But it will not let you go—the rage—unless you find a way into the pain 

Sad to say, Clooney and those sailors went down with the ship
It’s not much of a metaphor, then, unless you can flip the script
And claw your way to that horizon
Where the sunlight warms and burns you to death
Like the boy covered in dragon scales who became himself again, but
With searing pain—the sloughing off of second skin—
The agony of being lost and found
The strain of being saved
As the ocean always brings its truth to bear:

The path of life is more painful than death
Resurrection far harder than a watery grave 

Good Fruit

There is something gained, of course, in the glad reality that
I can peel and pierce an orange whenever I like (or twice, or thrice)
Can walk or bike to the grocery and engorge on citrus
With fine happy fingers or the expectant knife

But one hundred fifty years ago, a woman walked six miles to town
And waited two hours for a train, late at the gate from a broken beam,
Which finally lumbered and gave out, with a great sigh of steam, 
After a trail too long, a master mean

And from a car she watched, as they hauled though the yard
Mail and bundles and boxes large, and a sack of fruit
Which, ten minutes later, in the general store, she made sure
Was first unpacked and, laying her hands on two—the limit—
She paid bright coins for that good booty, then walked back the six miles
A smile in each step

All to bring her girl a gift, a Magi, a wise woman  
And the girl gaped
As if the skies peeled back and angels sang, at the sight of that orange orb
All on Christmas day

There’s something gained in that story, too,
The beauty of effort, the perfection of simple things
When you still have eyes to see miracles all around you
And the soul’s longing is longer, made more sure by how it finds you
And what it will require of you

There's something lost, too, in how easily I weigh and peel the things
Or throw away the ones which fail to please
Because, after all, life is hard, and it’s often hard because it’s easy
And easy doesn’t please me, or you, or us
With these souls meant for good, hard work
To fill the earth, subdue it,
And bring of our lives sweet, good fruit 

Hard Candy

I bought six boxes of my favorite candies—
Hard coffee toffee that tastes like Christmas and childhood
Figuring that their presence,
There in the basket by the pantry,
Would fancy my delight after each hard daylight

Men used to come home and curse Kennedy or Nixon and pour a Scotch
It’s something close to that
To take the edge off|
But they just sat there, untouched
As calendar pages dropped one by one in a long film noir montage, through the seasons

When I came back to them, they had soured, gone soft
And I ended up trying to freeze them back to life before throwing them out
All rubbish

Then, at Christmas,
My sweet wife got me a small package of the same, nestled into the toe-nook of my stocking
And like a Phoenix rising,
They tasted, one by one, like bliss incarnate, bedeviling senses
A bite-sized shell of soul-song

I don’t know what it all means, but I’m quite sure there’s a parable or a poem somewhere inside this story, like a soft caramel center

Storehouses don’t always please the soul
It’s not the having, it’s the letting go
Delight is a dish best served slow

The Strange Truth of Last Hours

The whir and beep of the machines will go on
Transferred to some other room, newly washed and dressed,
They will walk on, mindlessly,
Insentient of their duty,
While the sun, too, keeps shining
And the grass outside the window is postcard perfect

Everything about the noise and the bright light of this day is paradox
Comforting torment
Laborious rest
Natural life prolonged artificially, 
As death stands windswept by the windows

I stood to the side as he squeezed his son’s hand and told him,
“Don’t be angry with God”
I kept a poker face, like the machines beeping, pretending
They aren’t the slow countdown, after which,
They will stretch, wash, take a smoke, and start again

But my breath caught and I almost laughed
Not because it was funny, of course
It’s just that, when everything’s absurd—our longing for life betrayed—
Truth is a cold glass of water poured over hot souls
And the steam is so strange
Through it, there’s some indictment of what we’re holding dear

It indicted me, anyway
And I laughed because it’s so odd and pure and good
That the one dying should so easily let go
While I stand by with fists clenched, beside so many bedsides

On Clichés Becoming True

On my math teacher’s desk in junior high there was a postcard standing sentry to remind us that “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey,” the first in a long kick-line of clichés we learned to dismiss along with all the veracity of romance novels
Either so clearly false (unenchanted wands waved to produce one last bit of sleep for us, the awakening ones)
Or truths so true they became trees to the proverbial forest of our heart’s unseeing wilderness

“Aim for the moon, if you miss, you’ll land among the stars”
(maybe)
“Sticks and stones will break your bones but words will never hurt you”
(until you start therapy, twenty years from now, and find they are all still inside you)
“God will never give you more than you can handle”
(no wonder so many people hate God)

Even with the true ones, you don’t know the truth until it’s true for you
And familiarity breeds contempt, so we overlook the closest truths to hand
Until we stumble into them and remember we read them on a poster back in high school

As when I cleaned my yard this afternoon and saw all the unscrupulous pieces of dirt,
Returned after last week’s good brooming
And the leaves fallen once again, the vines re-claiming aimless space,  
And I knew, as of a sudden seeing,
There will be no place in my life, no space in my yard, where it’s done
My backyard has become the metaphor I’ve denied, the cliché I’ve hid away, the fact revealed:
There is only journey

Yes, I feel it now in my bones, moving up my stomach with sobering sight, this revelation,
That I will not arrive
There is no destination except deeper down and real, where God is—
The arrival of letting go

And somehow, without wondering what else I could be doing or where else I could be besides here,
I put my hands on the rough-catching handle of the rake
The bristled top-hat of the broom (with its flakes of paint falling in a great irony, to be swept away)
And move the dirt that’s always returning, holding the rake with steady breaths, at peace, while another sort of irony snakes back upon itself
Finding me mindful for a moment, that  

The journey is an always-becoming-destination
A train station merging always with the tracks
A process so very close to place 

Omar, on the Border

My body can no longer hold my spirit  
It shakes at the smallest lifting
It quakes through the watches of the day

And in the night, when I lie quiet,
Awake
I can’t sit straight, stand, get up

You move your hands, feeding me, shaving me
My chin presses in as my body abandons me
Once again, this morning
This now eternal re-occurring
The never-ending boarding of the flight of myself
Leaving me, as I stand at the window, waving

But my mind still sees so clear and bright and clean
I peer through the curtains, and in-between here and the hills, the highway
With its flashes of sun, reflecting off all the cars and trucks
That run and ride blind to the dumb luck of youth

Quick rivers of light flash into being
Blinding apparitions through these partitions of glass
Promising some world enflamed with the light of the sun
Some world burning on the other side

Escape from LA

I made a home where the sun always shines
With freeways and palm trees and traffic signs
A home where you rest your wearied feet
Though you’ve walked not a mile, and stepped not a beat
But pedaled through madness, through crowds, and through heat
In gray lanes, in metros, and urban retreats
And neon, and smiles, and meet-cutes-and-greets

Through refrains of headaches, the seasons are concrete
And tulips and roses are burned out by heat
So asphalt’s the flavor that floats on the breeze
And car horns the sonnets that play through the trees
The song of the autumn is trucks in their straining
In merging lane-changings with no thank you waving
As they swagger and stomp with their impolite feet
And bleat down the freeway like overstuffed sheep

But now I’m bound for somewhere far
I feel the burning, I’ll answer the call
Of land where sea is rolling in green
Where summer is gentle and winter is mean
And we’ll forget interchanges and pages and frets
From smog alerts and the hundreds of texts
Beeping like peace-seeking missiles directed
At a man’s sense of quiet and silence and feeling
Without which a man can’t make rest with his being

We’re bound and we’re leaving, we’re going afar
We’ll search through the bogs, barbaric and wild,
That thaw when the springtime’s passion’s enthralled
We’ll find them, we’ll walk them, we’ll sit on their logs
We'll battle the brooding of mist and of fog
As the geese and the mallard honk on the breeze
As windstorm and headwinds sing through the trees
And the bog echoes back with the croak of its frogs  

We’ll ride to the north woods,
We’ll hunt for the birch
We’ll hike through the forest
We’ll wipe off the dirt
Where magpies and skylarks and puffins are perched
Where the November storms promise battle has come
And we’ll grip and we’ll feel the roll in the stern
When the aft tips downward and sails are a-fly
And the spray of the sea puts salt in your eye

Yes, we’ll sail to the lands where the flags are a-buckled
And windstorms and raindrops send curtains a-ruffle
And the wind in your hair sends your backbone a-tingle
With the promise behind it of storm and of winter
And we’ll laugh and we’ll relish the flight and the fear
And will earn every draught of the sun and the clear

We’ll know that out here a man will be drowned
And we’ll revel that mystery still can be found
Far from the mouse ears and freeways and sounds
And the asphalt that blankets and covers the ground

We’ll start a new baseline, with shadows and fears
We’ll learn to tremble at the roar of the tears
Of the vast-speckled autumn, melting the year
Till winter, so naked and barren and sparse,
Reminds us that life is a poem not a farce
Of sun and of surgery, highways and cars
But a battle for living that must leave its scars

We’ll respect the black ebony of December’s floorings
When winter at last has slipped from her moorings
And then as the snow casts its pall on the land
We’ll laugh and we’ll revel and grab at its hand
And go skipping down hillsides and dales and down glens
We’ll run through the meadow and skate oe’r the fens

And when winter has locked the land up in its grasp
And no man can stir, not a moose nor a mouse
We’ll curl by the fire and look through the glass
Where snowflakes are falling and coming down fast
We’ll look and we’ll know that preparing is past
That now is the time to batten the hatch
And that fire is friend and our strength and our life
We’ll laugh and we’ll rest in the joy and the strife

And all will be quiet and silent and holy
We’ll wake with the morn and go to sleep slowly
To hear every noise of the wood off its feet
Slumbering through cold, the snow and the sleet

And when springtime so dappled revives all the trees
And the birdsong returns on the meadows and lees
When summer comes golden, with wheat in its hands
No one will find us nor know where we stand
We’ve gone out a-roaming and roving the land