So Recklessly We Spent those Days

So recklessly we spent those days,
blinded in our youth to Eden
we were living in, nor knew a need
to question or to savor. One
with the headlong moment,
friend to our cousin trees and paths,
familiar as a living room and furniture.

And how else should we live?
No other way; each day we greedily consumed
and took its nourishment,
eating the ever-renewing souls
of sunshine and the leaf,
the dirt road and the pond,
growing within ourselves
new landscapes, whose rooted ways
can guide us as they did
back then.

December 1 2009

When You Said Morning

When you said morning on the street today
it sounded so exactly like
what I imagined I remembered
all the farmers to have said,
days in layers,
each preceding year--
in the fraudulent cool of summer mornings
when potatoes can be dug,
in the frank and snapping cold of winter
when the bare ground breaks beneath your numbing feet;
going in and out of odorous hardware stores
where bins of bolts await inspection
and the dry camaraderie drones,
or in the chemical garage where ancient drawers
hold dusty buckets for the children under
shelves of fragrant DDT. When you said morning
I saw postal trucks and gardens, old
canoes and hillsides paved with needles
slippery to the foot and hidden wintergreen
where once we ate and once I mourned,
fallen apples surrounding the trees
and waiting to be gathered up in baskets for the pie,
and brooks whose rusty brown contains both leeches
and the tiniest of fish and are too wide
for one revered old man to step across;
and long before, that morning
racing down the crystal soaking frozen lawn
barefoot coming home from half a world away
across the sharpest of driveway stone
to berries
in a well-remembered bowl;
when you said morning.

November 10 2009

Because It Is This Fragile Moment

Because it is this fragile moment
I will stay.
Her cheek is round against my pillow where
she crept while I was sleeping and

on that curve her lashes tangent lie
an offhand touch of beauty looks
so easy she is breathing
exhalations I can only see and she

does not know I watch and will
not wake her will not
break
this fragile moment.

November 2 2009