Walking with the Wild
As I make my way to ocean’s edge,
the sea raises its voice.
The wind puts its mouth to my ear.
Along the shore, a graveyard market
for vultures: snook, grouper, jack, jellies,
one immense loggerhead.
Gulls skirl, keening part of the salt-
stippled air. Against the jetty,
waves chew into stone.
To walk with the wild is to slough off
the tangle and puff—the week’s gabble
of words, political, honeyed words that slide
off the tongue—to dump the head rush
against groaning buoys, into the slash and slice
of tides. Here where words do not exist,
the mind stretches and swells,
surges with the billowing waves.
Respite
In late afternoon, a woman watches time move
through the landscape from her
perch in the tree house.
A breeze swishes incantations among dappled leaves
and stalks
of goldenrod,
ferries the chit and chatter of squirrels across the pond.
Songs of cardinals,
grosbeaks, and a wood thrush
ring from the nearby woods. Finches at the feeder
sing the melting
color of butter.
In this liquid song, when day’s not quite night,
when the
earth is charged with presence,
the sun rests on treetops. A lone leaf spirals down.
Blue
shadows begin to creep across lawns,
amethyst crowns the tonsured hills in the distance.
Everything quiets even the barking
dog.
In this liminality of stretched borders,
in the rousing final movement of the sun’s syzygy
with the moon, something wondrous
happens,
and the awe we never lost as children reappears,
elemental, inexhaustible.
Musing in the Tree House
To be where you are
To wait and watch
as a huge oak leaf
dives from the tree’s
highest branch
to a current that ferries it
to another shore
where snagged
by the screen
the leaf tugs against wire mesh
loosens its tip
wavers
turns sideways
and falls to the sill
where autumn breath gives it wing
among murmuring leaves and
dappled shadow
Where everything moves
like a Pollack painting
yet
all is silent
Listening