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
