Hummingbird Ballet
Aerial ballet,
Allegro avian wings a-flutter,
Humming an accompaniment
For tiny body suspended in tremolo,
Sipping sweet sugar solution
From flowered feeders.
We suspend our disbelief,
For the micro moment you light,
And sip, savor, the pure grace
Of your miraculous presence.
Where Deer Sleep
That place where the Moon
goes from whole to slithered,
bites of dust, smiles of yellow
rock, strange toenail shapes amidst
a royal navy blue canvas of stars,
growing dimmer the closer they are.
Just hidden enough to be found in
the bushes, sea urchin green, springing
up as coverage for all the earthlings which
do not sleep
In front of a thousand oaks, a family of
Whitetail Deer, each resting on a
pod of grass indented like the forehead of
an infant. There is a nakedness to this ritual,
a non-terrestriality, signs of the Creator’s indivisibility.
A place where deer sleep. Beside the specter
of daffodils blooming in untimely silences, made of
atoms, bones held by the same basic power source
of gravitational waves that only deer listen to.
Wrapped together for some reason, around the Sun, stretching
out into space, atomic reactions to the night. From sunrise to
sunset, turning away from the hours traveling across the sky.
Roughing It
I remember cold backpack mornings in Augusts
in the Adirondacks in the late 1960s, hanging-in
our sleeping bags long after waking from sleep
on our tarps only to watch for the longest time
while sunlight clambered down from tree tops
to give us the warming inspiration to crawl out
our snug sleeping bags and launch the new day.
Once with my late sister Karen in an open-front
lean-to shelter along Diamond Mountain Brook,
where a side trail leads to the Siamese Ponds,
the weather had been so warm that we took
our summer bags, only to find the lean-to floor
bare of the expected insulating balsam boughs.
Just barely past midnight we both awoke
bone-cold, deciding to sit up in our bags, our
feet propped on our backpacks, keeping them
off the cold lean-to floor. It reminded me how
Karen and I once rode eastward from college,
home for our Christmas break in the back seat
of a classmate’s car whose heater didn’t work.
At five degrees, we wore our gloves on our feet,
while we sat on our hands to keep them warm.
Awakening
Mottled beams of sunlight
Filter down through dense canopies,
To feed the whispering, wooded forest.
Stirred breezes and shadows move like liquid
Over a carpet of soft pine, fir and spruce,
Signing the expectant dance cards
Of lithe ferns, purple trillium and yellow violets.
Sleepy, hatted heads of mushrooms, peek toward day.
From all directions, tenor trills of warblers
Pierce cocooning olivine and emerald shade.
The shush of fresh streams and creeks,
Stemmed by branch-rich damns of toiling beavers,
Sing of the sunrise, as it is mirrored in a myriad
Of translucent lakes.
Speckled twin fawns are born to greet the world gently,
Bathed in buoyant, healing air.
All breathe,
As the forest revels in the exultant goodness
Of a mountain morning.
A Definition in Mind
It emerges as fungi on
birch logs. Quiet. The mind
is what can exist if we are
not afraid to let it grow. Alone.
Softer than ivory and clear as
a gathering storm. Its dark energy
is all around us. In the dying embers
of secret traditions, it knows the
promises that had to be broken.
Adirondack Mountain Matins
Tremulous aspen leaves applaud
each breeze without discrimination
Unseen hummingbird wing beats
render human heartbeats both
static and ecstatic by comparison
Monarch caterpillars munch milkweed
to make themselves toxic to predators
These mountains are great grandparents
to the far Himalayas and wear down
slower than the novice monk’s stout will
Beloved Camp
The ties that find, nurture and bind,
That bring them home from where they roam,
Epicenter, here they enter,
Family land, from hand to hand.
King trees enclose this place that grows,
Within the heart, when far apart,
Its living lake, their thirst does slake.
Cabin of wood through decades stood,
It held them strong, brought them along,
From child to man, they hiked and ran,
They rowed in boats, their tubes afloat,
They swam with loons, heard cricket tunes,
Walked on the beach, sweet laughter reached
From shore to shore, they echoed more,
Hiked peaks so bold, then cooked on coals,
The bounty sown on land hard-grown,
They say their grace to bless this place.
In summer breeze with songs of leaves,
All rest their heads in downy beds,
And vow they’ll come with each year’s sun,
Their spirits, kindred, every one
Cigarette by the Campfire
Scanning the caramel darkness, like
a frantic panther, my cool, thick,
blossoming honey words-rise off
my face, lunging off your fingers
into the ashes, a spiritual experience
scattered into the outlines of mountains.
Yet when you flick off the universe,
I can almost see the anguished edges,
and as you hugged me, I could feel again.
Taking the first drag…
If not for that cigarette, I feared one without you,
Programmed into a phone without reception,
soft as the look of dampened embers disappearing
into a lonely campfire, so petite and luminous,
all covered in the holy, appearing out of the ashen slush.
Somehow Changed
The woman asleep upstairs in the old summer cabin
awakens to the voice of a psychic Welsh friend
four states away. She hears her name called twice,
the voice pitched low, low and guttural.
The woman peers out the narrow open window
to the left of the fieldstone chimney.
A black bear growls up at her, once, twice.
She recoils from the cheese-cloth-screened window.
Theirs is now the last dwelling on the former dirt road
out of an upstate New York hamlet two miles away.
The steep last 80 yards of their road is still dirt.
The woman will recover sleep but is somehow changed.
The Cardinals And The Bishop’s Son
‘Twas a cold and sodden May,
When Bishop’s Son and wife and pup,
Traveled far, from South to the North,
Where at home they did wind up.
Bishop’s Son tended the land,
Then saw unruly growth on trees,
So raised his axe to trim the shrubs,
When a sweet sight he did see.
A nest of rosy hatchlings,
With eyes still closed and mouths outstretched,
As Red Father-Bird stood his guard,
And Mother, more food did fetch.
She, plain in plumage, did fly,
From mate on fence, to branch, to nest,
Singing proud of her chicks, well-born,
In Bishop’s Son’s tree of rest.
Do not Google it
Accept that it
slumbers over
silky nets
of sword ferns.
When daybreak
shines on them you
will know without asking.
You were a bright surprise.
Looking up, I saw you in flight,
Balancing on buoyant breezes,
Bravely, blithely,
From blade to emerald blade.
A mere wisp of twin wings, no more.
Honey, brown and black,
Sunbeams shone through you,
As I beheld your body, barely there,
I wished to be you,
And the change you herald.
Deftly floating like a whispered wish,
Or a daydream,
You perch prettily, precariously,
On green shoots pointing,
To heaven.
I bow to your power, tiny warrior,
As you greet me,
To grace me,
And the universe,
With your gentle gift.
I know these tracks
in my tendons.
I know this forest.
How it pounds
into the shale, like a
crumbling ravine of snow
the color of mink fur.
I know this forest. Its wisdom
returns to me from vanished
glaciers, and I hear the sleep of
beasts in tombs of rotting Hemlock.
I know that I am not alone, but
these embers of tradition
cannot be shared.
Again this early morning
I leave the kitchen light off
as I eat my cold cereal with milk
to re-mind me of our long ago
days at our Adirondack cabin
that promised an imminent
fishing trip to the backwoods
with each year’s hoped-for surprise
finds of new beaver work there
thrilling to Trout’s tug on our line
in this communion of the saints
my brother Matt holds the chalice
and then produces the bread
from his shoulder-slung creel.
Bluest blue,
Belies the timpani of thunder that warns,
Storm coming.
Trilling crescendo of avian flautists sounds,
As feathered soloists shelter in trees.
Couplet notes of dragonflies,
Scurrying, scrabbling snare drums of gray squirrels warn,
Storm coming.
Rat-a-tat percussion of cascading droplets
Bless my skin, kiss my hair, soften my dress.
Wet blades of grass waltz and conduct in elemental time,
Primal heartbeat metronomes,
Washing my bare toes with their grace.
Every windgust turns a new page in it’s airborne aria and
Warns,
Storm coming,
Storm cleansing,
Storm inspiring,
Storm renewing.
As it always will.
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