the arm of my chair
and the morning before me.
Everyone thought I’d die
in my twenties, thirties, forties, fifties.
This can’t go on forever.
There are mornings
when everything brims with promise,
even my empty cup.
Two squirrels fight
to near death,
red blood flecking green grass,
while chipmunks continue feeding.
What pleasure: a new straw hat
with a green brim to look through!
Rowing across the lake
all the dragonflies are screwing.
Stop it. It’s Sunday.
Throw out the anchor
unattached to a rope.
Heart lifts as it sinks.
Out of my mind at last.
On every topographic map,
the fingerprints of God.
When we were very poor one spring
I fished a snowy river and caught
a big trout. It changed our lives
that day: eating, drinking, singing, dancing.
Lost: Ambition.
Found: A good book,
an old sweater,
loose shoes.
Years ago
when I became tough as a nail
I became a nail.
An old song from my youth:
“I’m going to live, live, live
until I die.” Well, perhaps not.
Still at times I’m a dumb little boy
fishing from a rowboat in the rain
wanting to give the family a fish dinner.
Only today
I heard
the river
within the river.
Clear summer dawn,
first sun steams moisture
redly off the cabin roof,
a cold fire. Passing raven
eyeballs it with a quawk.
The rabbit is born
prepared for listening,
the poet just for talk.
As a boy when desperate I’d pray with bare knees
on the cold floor. I still do,
but from the window I look like an old man.
Two buzzards
perched on a hay bale
and a third just gliding in.
I want to describe my life in hushed tones
like a TV nature program. Dawn in the north.
His nose stalks the air for newborn coffee.
Turtle has just one plan
at a time, and every cell
buys into it.
The biomass of ants,
their total weight on earth,
exceeds our own.
They welcome us to their world
of small homes, hard work, big women.
But the seventeen-year cicada
has only one syllable.
What prizes and awards will I get for revealing
the location of the human soul? As Nixon said,
I know how to win the war but I’m not telling.
Some days
one needs to hide
from possibility.
She climbed the green-leafed apple tree
in her green Sunday dress. Her white panties
were white as the moon above brown legs.
Is this poem a pebble,
or a raindrop coated with dust?
Each time I go outside the world
is different. This has happened
all my life.
When I found my tracks in the snow
I followed, thinking that they might
lead me back to where I was. But
they turned the wrong way and went on.
I schlump around the farm
in dirty, insulated coveralls
checking the private lives of mice.
I heard the lake cheeping
under the ice, too weak
to break through the shell.
Nothing to do.
Nowhere to go.
The moth just drowned
in
