Rhymes from a River
A
stream so full a swamp seems dry,
A
dawn, a golden scar.
A
chain of mallards drifting by,
A
chain of geese afar.
A
willow shading bloated spill
Above
a quick mink's wake.
A
tethered rowboat not quite still,
A
glint of water snake.
A
tree crown shading early light,
A
red root sucking mud.
A
sap vein coursing its full height
Above
the river flood.
A
human touch, the dock protrudes,
An
angle thrusting out,
A
wooden stage for solitude,
A
span to nurture doubt.
________________________________
After Christian Wiman
Published in Measure, Fall 2008
Haiku
-- sun-gold
Sun-gold
edge
to weeping
willow leaf...
brief,
airy dance!
__________________________
Pub. by Aurorean March 2004
Meadow Walk
I stride out of pines
into sunlight.
The stutter of the
red-tail,
a sickle raking the
sky,
spells despair.
Furry field creatures,
flee!
I stroke thuriferous
milkweed,
part rasp-edged brush,
seek the field’s
secrets:
ear-taunting rustlings
and raspberries
tart on the tongue.
Give me a year to
haunt this clay:
to ponder, to muse
to pour seed pearls
into hourglass cases
that measure the
movement
of worms
and sounds
that haunt the
cave-curtains
of ground hogs who
lumber through
comb-like meadows
with stones
near brooks bearing
fish to the sea.
__________________________
Published in Avocet,
Summer 2004
Cold
October - limerick
Cold October made four hairy bees
Soporifically lie at their ease,
Each apparently dead
On a thistle-stem head,
Until warmed in the sun by
degrees.
_________________________________________
Published October 2011 online at OEDILF (The Omnificent
English Dictionary in Limerick Form) under the dictionary
entry "at one's ease."
This River Hill
I step from rock to rock at the water’s edge.
Cold wind flutes across my ear.
My heavy shoes loosen igneous grains
to join their fellows on the beach
where bleached shells and pulverized granite
attend the river’s offering---float of weed, bloat of bass,
coot feather, cola can propelled on wave’s breath
through rocky shallows to the strand.
This island rock, this river hill
this eroded base of a mountain peak,
was once higher than Everest.
A mile-high glacier,
bent on decapitating the mountain,
grinding, scraping, with granite fingernails
clawed
our Paleozoic stone.
My shoe prints won't
last on this beach.
Soaking roots curl
along the shore to a low ledge.
Easy leg up, I walk
the slab that flaunts
its glacial streaks
across the shelf.
What Indians walked
this river shore long ago
whose ancestors left
Africa heading East
across Siberia, the
Pacific, the Rockies
the Great Lakes
to meet my forbears
whose ancestors left
Africa to head West
across Europe and the
Atlantic,
to fetch up on this
river plain?
What boulders in the
St. Lawrence were dropped
by the glacier after
scraping our rock rim?
Those humpbacked, outsize cobbles
clumped in a watery
course---lurk
beneath the sky's
reflection.
Bane of the keel
boats,
I've bumped them
myself
with my centerboard.
Now I wander
rudderless
along the
wave-dampened sand
and wind-dried shale.
I hunt the glacier's
longevous traces
and find its spoor on
our Cambrian coast.
I am the rover, I am
the witness
invoking the ghosts of
ancestors and ice.
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