When I See the Riotous Waves

When I see the riotous waves running up 
the wall to join the celebration of the bursting over
and we wade the cascading stream because he leaps
in frantic supplication,
the temptation is strong to travel with him 
miles across that wooded wetland where the water stands
and teach him to come back to my hand
no matter how glorious the scent.

December 27 2012

For David et al

The tides come in
as surely as they depart.
To finish is to find another start.
The losses that we suffer 
are accompanied by birth
and heaven saves what's lost, and mends 
what's broken on the earth.

For David Coulter Stewart, and others

December 19 2012

The Running Clouds

The clouds are running at cross-purposes
up and down the darkened hallways of the sky.
The distant loom of night in day above the farther shore
is guaranteeing rain, and maybe something more,
a sulky rumble mutters. Then we are visited by water
and walking becomes a taildown damp necessity:
How good will the towel feel,
and the coffee, and the curling chair.

December 10 2012

Beginner's Tai Chi

Things are made of other things
and make up other things.
It is only this simple chemistry
I understand.
And when I part the horse's mane
and the white crane spreads its wings,
even that, they say, may fall away from me.
I am not fluent in the world
and sometimes, I admit,
it seems better not to be.
But along with abdication
comes a lesson in humility
and an inkling, in a silent pose,
that little knowledge is not always liability.

December 10 2012

Calling all code breakers

Just for fun, can you break this code? It uses a method I thought of the other day:

23U5K2I1R3J6W4C9Z8N5R6V3U2C9V4F4G7I9T9L1R5V3B6K2E

The Circle Moon

The circle moon
has pulled a neighboring planet
close, as if to kiss 
its face.
Because the tide
inside is rising
as I fall
asleep, it seems
my dreams could be high
maybe enabling 
me again 
to fly.

November 28 2012

Cloudscape

The Dreams

The dreams are always about mundane things.

You ask where we should go for lunch;
I say Phin's or Sam's Place,
knowing I can't decide,
but the dream takes us away from all that anyway.

I should take out the trash,
but our youngest daughter needs help with her homework
and that is more interesting.
I will do the trash in a minute or two
if the dream doesn't change again.

I am contemplating an apple on our orange cutting board.
The peeler is ready in my hand;
you say we can make a pie, but
--and this is the strange part--
in the dream, that is something
I have never known you to do.
I think about challah also
golden, golden,
and just before I wake up
I am suddenly happy.

November 19 2012

Summer Unthought

The waves are brown with churned up weed.
The sea beyond seems calm, belying.
Don't search the stones you trespass on for meaning.

On this side, the tide has come up to 
the wetlands boundary.
The herons white and grey regard each other
and pass on. 
In the drowning field they search for food
whose meaning is their business,
none of yours.

Return home with your dog;
leave all this thought behind.

September 2012

Catalogue

That it will all be here tomorrow
as it is today. 
That this knotted web will break
and the new strands lie across each other pliant,
receptive to the air.
That this one and that one 
will grow with grace and beauty.
That the world will not fail my feet.
That these rocks will retain their identity
and ask nothing of me but to be.
That this street is not a result
or act of futility.
That mist is only mist
and rain is only rain
and from a spare significance
sweet joy will rise again.
With this and many others,
like a growing tree built leaf on leaf,
that fail in the aging days
but give their bodies to new copies
when the days renew,
I will catalogue this desperate belief.

September 29 2012

Poem by Gail Peterson Stewart

This poem is by my mother, Gail Peterson Stewart. It's a personal favorite.

Ave Maria

You have the gift
of hearing
snow
fall

silent questions
silent answers

somehow you catch and hold them out to me
one by one

look:
a light, a web, a wheel, a sun
all white
all true
and fallen they make my landscape new.

To Dream of Albino Tigers

To dream of albino tigers
must mean something.
Adopting one full-grown seems dangerous.
Imagine your apprehension when he wakes,
abandoning the couch, to prowl
nearer.
Will he ask you merely to stroke his head?
What more might he take?

September 14 2012

The Grapes

Ah
the grapes are falling
but the young dog
doesn't care.

Under
the darkening arbor eaves
he scents new prey
cold, in the shrinking days.

September 8 2012

Untitled 8/31/2012

The sighing off the sea

the sighing off to sea

this is the breathing in

the breathing out

that lovers land and water

are unafraid to trade

inhaling each 

the other's exhalation.

August 31 2012

The Bird in My Throat

The bird in my throat
startles, caught.
I can feel the convulsion of its wings
in that narrow canal and see
its bright and alien eye
in the darkness of a swallow.
Plainly, it wants to escape.
Suppose its feathered self came bursting forth
and its song was a shriek about beak and talon,
wrathful from confinement?
But equally that springing voice could be
exultation,
announcing a birth in the nest, my heart,
and a broken shell revealing how
the world has wonders fledged
and what they are.

August 17 2012

Many Good Things

Many good things require travel
like parking in a place you have never been

and a long walk towards evening

with a folded blanket rolled beneath your arm.

There is also often waiting.

Preferably children are involved,

whose patience is greater than you had hoped

and who can fill the interim,

as darkness filters down and renders nearby families invisible,

with questions that sound new but distantly familiar.

Finally, when your happiness bursts against the sky

you will see that the odyssey was worth it

because the children are well satisfied

as they walk back tired to the car

with the miracle you wrought on their behalf.

August 7 2012

The Certainty of Storms

I will say this about the certainty of storms:
When doors bang shut 
and papers lift and fly from tables,
and sudden darkness presses 
confidentially close to open windows,
we are justified in hoping for a change.
Storms are good redeemers.
But when they sizzle and crash,
and crack the day in two,
the palpitating dog
and the children suddenly downstairs
know something we do not
about the certainty of storms.

July 24 2012

The Dog's Path

The dog's path was extraordinary.
He led me through a shaded wood
along a path that ran out to the marshes.
There I saw the sky
and the marching clouds
and the boaters on the river.
He was white against the green
and the green lay below the blue
and we walked back to the car
and the river came back with us.

July 23 2012

A Grieving Man

I dreamed I was comforting a grieving man
whom I knew but do not now recognize.
There was a death, of course--
what else is grieving for?--
and he couldn't be consoled.
He seemed to be a member of my family,
and how I wanted to help him,
but the depth of the tears in which we floundered
was such that I could not touch the bottom.
I am ashamed to admit that I was glad I woke
so I could turn over in my bed
and start another dream on dry land.
I can't go back; that choice was made for me 
possibly by my helplessness; 
but of course I hope that in his distant dream
where he walks he has found a little ease.

July 16 2012

Summer July 6 2012

Summer made it all more real.
Driving home with the takeout
was like running along a polished blade
that honed its edge on every red light, license plate, and shimmering car.
The dogs' bodies idled on the dazzling decks
and the basketball youths went shirtless down the tar.
Over fences, neighborhood radios tried to outshout 
each others' boasts of love and pride and anger,
but all the mouthless objects of the metal day
were speaking secrets louder than the songs.
It was staggering, the way that blade swept through it all
and left its searing gash of unreadable meaning.
(But consider also that in another place,
the rabbit under the roof of a ragged bush
kept its silent rendezvous, trembling, unthinking, 
with a different, whispered truth of how things are.)

July 6 2012

Bottles of Beer

This is the pure limerick form of some doggerel I posted on Facebook recently. Thanks to Deanna D. and Julie F. for edits. The original follows.

Half the fun of bottles of beer
is making them each disappear.
The remaining part
is the joy in your heart
of knowing the next one is near.

Original:

Half the fun of bottles of beer
is making them disappear.
The other part
is the joy in your heart
of knowing the next one is near.

June 30 2012

The Term Broken

The term broken does occur to me.

The silence where the words once were
is evident. A dangling catch
for a hook that has fallen away
and a door bangs foolishly
in the interior image of a white and rainy day.

Among my friends I count the rushing arms of trees
whose lace embraces every coming storm.
Today they are hanging heavy, nothing more,
greenrobed in sodden velvet
much too lush to bear.

On our morning round, the sturdy sidewalk,
like the houses, trees, and sky,
yields nothing but the practicality of day.

Even the beach and the marshside shingle
are swept clean of phrases and left grey
by a tide that has combed the hair of the seaweed hillocks
in the sand like the heads of sunken giants
and is silently, damnably out.

This must be what it is like to see
the world with eyes alone.
God send an ending to this barren time;
repair the words
and let the landscape show  again
its meter and its rhyme.

June 15 2012

Contact

How else are we enabled to mow summer lawns
than by the swing of the contact hitter?
He is steady over one sixty-two
and teaches us to be steady.
He knows that the game is not
to the home run hitter alone,
but to the measured pacing of the season's train.

Injury and heartache,
catastrophe and simple strain--
they all must tell, but there's a canny balance
to be gained from an eye that finds the gap
and a stance that takes whatever pitch is given.

The contact hitter understands
the storms of spring and summer's droughts,
the soar, the fall. The through it all, the keeping on:
they are his example. We are better players since
we saw it, his old truth:
bell curves save the day for all of us
and in the longest run,
the advantage is with the average.

April 22 2012

How the Falling Petals

How the falling petals of my heart
do love to spin and tumble
in the sudden stirring of the summer
that surrounds you.

May 29 2012

Getting Up in Africa

Waking of the dawn
birds have their hollow cries
echoing
a dewy jungle in
humidity, trails possibly
padded by feral paws or
given plumed wonder
of the bright-eyed morning.
Tea.

May 15 2012

It Is the Simple Veiling

It is the simple veiling of the day
by night: Look, the gentle dark
that silences our sight
and breathes its benediction in,
to fill the room with mercy 
so our souls may heal
and we may sleep again.

May 8 2012

Salad

To hold this life in two wondering hands
is to feel that I embrace
a veritable salad of leafy miracles.
These Bibbs and Bostons,
these slices and gratings,
these dropped-in fruits and dicings are
for me to consume,
but better yet,
I hold them out
to you.

April 21 2012

Spring Opened

Spring opened like a door in the side of Winter,
and through it sang the thrilling trill of newmade frogs,
whose chant in the chilling evening turned
the outside air into the strangest and warmest promise
of a careless life outside,
whose doors are only screens 
and never locked.

April 5 2012

Three Items From a Walk

I passed a hapless scrap of purple 
tossed bumbling across the path;
I learned that the turbine's arms
sweep the blue air with the sound 
of constantly passing jets;
I found the shell of a nut whose interior 
framed an empty heart.
One thing to remember; 
one to tell;
one to give.

April 5 2012

Fictional Quote By a Fictional Character

"It is all right to not know ninety-nine percent of what is going on, because this is how all mortals have operated throughout history. The other one percent is enough, and a damn sight better than nothing."

-- Something I imagine Rooster Cogburn, in the remake of True Grit, might have said. I know, "Huh?" It's just something that occurred to me while I was watching the movie.

April 2 2012

Untitled 3/19/2012

It is not a watchword to remember,
not a mantra.
It is a vision that you found
around a turning in the trail,
of the ending of a trail
at a place you had not seen since childhood;
of a finally permissible rewinding
to a clear and happy state
of early grace, and of unexpected understanding
that the way is somehow clear,
and a waking in the heart
like morning, or a gentle coming home.

March 19 2012

Finn and Blanket

The Wind Brought This

The wind brought this, a singing day,
to us to live with ease.
Wings populate the trees
with children's chatter.
Nothing is their matter
but to report returning life,
the sheathing of winter's knife,
and in it all, the bounding dogs will play.

March 8 2012

Finn on a Blanket

Finn in a Blanket

It Was So Awakening

It was so awakening
in the fragile returning sun for him, I knew.
The detail of the dazzling shallow running water 
and the sand and shell beneath, I saw,
and the thrilling of his senses
in his  intimate examination of the marsh grass
warm, and rich with heady odors of the thaw
was also mine. 

How the unfamiliar brightness remembers for us
the rapture of the small,  
the focus down to these few early blades
and the pebbles in the stunning newborn light
and the staggering ants that crawl beneath,
new citizens of a rediscovered world,
too dazed, like us, to more than stand and breathe.

March 2 2012

All the Boats

All the boats are grounded in the harbor;
their masts are spectral lines
revealing the morning's composition
to those who can read God's mind.

The turning screws of the incoming wavelets;
the overlapping folds of the incoming wavelets,
like napkins laid neatly on the table of the shore;
the minor ridges of the incoming wavelets
that run beneath the water's dimples,
lifting them up
lowering them down
and leaving them behind;

nothing here's extraneous
except possibly a man and his dog.
Left alone, this place becomes
a demonstration of, and quiet meditation on
necessity, which orders everything in its reach
and lies beneath, the silent meaning
of this stony beach.

February 7 2012

The Night I Came to See You Go

The owl flew over my head the night 
I came to see you go,
and I have a memory of a fleeting fox
running from my lights, that may be incorrect.
While the helper hovered in my old room
I laid my hand on the broad arch of a back
I had always known was strong enough to carry the weight 
of any dark--but not perhaps the one in which
you had been so long asleep,
and where you no longer breathed.
Did you know that you were going?
When they carried you steeply down the angled stair
I was afraid in silent light infused with the color black,
and we would not have let you go 
out that New England company front door
like a stranger after an awkward visit,
except that the efficiency of your bearers
was not to be denied. 
How often since then have I recollected
and wondered where you were. It has never seemed
to me that you are gone; always I feel your distant regard
from a place I cannot see. Perhaps it is the same to which
they have retreated in both time and memory, invisible,
your guides and friends, the owl and the fleeting fox.

January 26 2012

There Are Fortunes Scattered

There are fortunes scattered through this house
on floors and counters and this desk.
After the cardboard containers were put away
we read the cryptic mottoes and predictions
and fed half the cookies to the wagging dog.
We shared our fortunes with each other;
I gave them mine and received
others in return. One child became the keeper
but her stock of paper strips is incomplete:
too many to keep up with and so they stay,
spread abroad in crannies after reading
so that anyone may find a fortune anywhere.
It is good to be so generous 
with each other and with these our given fates.

January 14 2012

Forward Lunge

We passed the wrinkled toe of a respectable tree
at the outermost point of a marathon march
intended to wear out the dog.
He paid it no improper attention,
being focused on easily beating the challenge
he had no knowledge of.
And as he strained the leash along the boardwalk over the bog,
the dog gave the squabbling ducks no more
than courtesy's inspection.
The overhead geese in their ragged vees 
were beneath his regard; only other dogs and people
and peculiar smells rated a brief diversion;
otherwise, it was only the forward lunge
he hungered for, toward whatever lay ahead,
to desperately want, to call, to reach, to catch,
to eat, and to chase again.

January 3 2012

First Night, Boston

The prospect of rain kept some people away
while others put on their raincoats of decision
but the end of the tip
of one fin of a fish 
made of ice 
was involved in its own dissolution.
Each drop of itself was a private goodbye 
to the public display of its crystalline form--
no looking back, a hurrying down
to form on the ground 
a fluid new resolution.

December 31 2011