4. FIVE OUT-OF-DOORS - Rhymes from a River, sun gold, Meadow Walk, Cold October, This River Hill

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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An earlier version was published Nov. 2004 in Thema.  A book version

with color photographs by Richard A. Young was published by Blurb Dec. 2009.