Time Is a Graceless Enemy, but Purls as It Comes and Goes

I’m winding down. The daylight is winding down.
                                                                     Only the night is wound up tight.
And ticking with unpaused breath.
Sweet night, sweet, steady, reliable, uncomplicated night.

September moon, two days from full,
                                                                      slots up from the shouldered hill.
There is no sound as the moon slots up, no thorns in its body.
Invisible, the black gondola floats
                                                          through down-lid and drowning stars.

When the Horses Gallop Away from Us, It’s a Good Thing

I always find it strange—though I shouldn’t—how creatures don’t care
                                                                     for us the way we care for them.
Horses, for instance, and chipmunks, and any bird you’d name.
Empathy’s only a one-way street.

And that’s all right, I’ve come to believe.
It sets us up for ultimate things,
                                                                    and penultimate ones as well.
It’s a good lesson to have in your pocket when the Call comes to call.

Remembering Bergamo Alto

A postapocalyptic poetry
                                                        starts with a dog bite
And featherless birds in the ruined trees,
People nowhere to be found.

Mostly it has to do with cities,
                                                                      and empty boulevards,
Chairs in the public parks with no one to sit in them.
Mostly it’s wind in vacant spaces,
                                                         and piano chords from a high window.

“This World Is Not My Home, I’m Only Passing Through”

The more you say, the more mistakes you’ll make,
                                                                                                          so keep it simple.
No one arrives without leaving soon.
This blue-eyed, green-footed world—
                                                                                  hello, Goldie, good-bye.

We won’t meet again. So what?
The rust will remain in the trees,
                                                                         and pine needles stretch their necks
Their tiny necks, and sunlight will snore in the limp grass.

In Memory of the Natural World

Four ducks on the pond tonight, the fifth one MIA.
A fly, a smaller than normal fly,
Is mapping his way through sun-strikes across my window.

Behind him, as though at attention,
                                                                            the pine trees hold their breaths.
The fly’s real, the trees are real,
And the ducks.
                                    But the glass is artificial, and it’s on fire.