STONE WALL

 

Old stone,

coursed gray granite

and mortar crumbling,

veins of countless shades

like wild rivers caught

in mothering molten past

now not a few inches from my face

and stretching out over the brown buried land

that runs in circle to the snow sky

and back to where we stand.

This old stone, face to face,

like some Leonardo crag on crag,

etched one ancient moment beyond comprehension,

stares back at me this winter’s day.

Though cold, I sense some consciousness watching,

though quiet, I feel a face breathing,

and wonder what it knows.

It’s bound to have seen one like me before,

one or a hundred,

and may wonder if I will lift it

to some other place.

It must prefer the company

of its own kind,

or more likely, is beyond caring,

having been cut out or crushed

by man or heaving winter

from its first galvanizing birth.

No doubt it was this treatment

that keeps it quiet now,

though somewhere speaks suggestion

in those seeing cracks, gray bones or beard

of some complicity.

 

 

 

Sailing

 

Salt she said

tasting spray,

as heartily he laughed coming about

to her left.

And she laughed, he hoped,

but no.

And nice she said

of his cockpit woodwork,

and just so he remembered it was,

like her blue china eyes,

carved exquisite he saw,

they as in the placid bay

reflect the clouds, his gaze,

or let the bottom out,

though crabs crawl sideways,

he recalled.

So hail, he beamed in his cheek,

as she lowered her lashes in the sunlight,

as he hoisted his highball to the crosstrees,

trimming the sheet to the sea breeze,

heeling the lay line to the harbor,

reaching the mooring by sunset,

wind willing.

 

 

Memory

Somewhere in my mind’s eye

in the country

white snow covers a pond and a hill

rising behind to meet at some point the sky.

Where one ends or the other leaves off

does not matter,

only the feeling that it is new snow

over the land and ice.

I can hear the blades of a skater

running rough over the wind-cleared holes,

or the footsteps of a solitary wanderer

denting the drifts, cracking the silence.

 

A picture recalled as if it were real,

as somewhere it may be,

or may have been,

like a sound in that place,

heard, muffled, so quick

as never to be sure

of its first coming.

 

I sit and look at the scene,

listening to its stillness,

waiting for its white white

to move in and fill my veins.

 

 

 

Le matin, merci

 

Across my eyes

in Red and Yellow frames

rolls the morning reel

 

Two cymbals meet

Le Petit Prince cartwheels

A shadow dissolves the light soft sun

become dark and long,

her hair, love’s flow, it song.

 

But I can form no living face

nor persuade her eyes

to mine embrace

 

I reach for her light soft shoulder

to kiss her white breast

but find Sun grown bolder

the Prince still spurning rest.

 

Red slips to Yellow

as two cymbals meet

and pass through each other

 

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