Night

I cannot master the beauty of the night
—Maurice Leseman, A Man Walks in the Wind—

I enter night
not knowing night,
the welcoming night,
the steep, unscalable night.

The wind is high tonight
and the dying maple groans
or laughs (maybe at my fragility).
I wonder what it sees of night.

Will I ever be one with night?
Will I blunder off course,
my path unseen
beyond the next blind turn?

I persist into shadow and wind
and wonder why I can’t turn back
though lost on this sightless path
to the steep starless night.

Unsung Songs, Unwritten Poems

it’s an unshiny gray day
not the day I proposed
for lounging in the shade
of my sugarberry tree

then she dashes by
her black ponytail
bouncing
bouncing
and I cannot run with her or after her
I’ll never catch up
after all I can’t even catch up
with myself

time passes
time always passes
even when I’m sitting down
with my legs crossed
contemplating
a beautiful black-ponytailed young woman
running by

where are my unsung songs
my unwritten poems?
maybe they’re chasing after
a black-haired beauty
who just turned the corner of my life
and vanished

Halloween 2009

Leaves are falling
and soon the maples, oaks and elms
will all be gray and bare

and the wind is gray
at my feet, swirling
debris to the gutter

of the street,
soon to be
crystalline white,

and the day grows empty,
clouds dissolve, and the wind,
resolving highs and lows,

pushes here, then there,
formless and aimless,
and I meander to

whatever it is I yearn for
but soon forget,
and now it’s dusk,

and the wind
dissolves whatever
remains of resolve,

and I turn back to the house,
somewhere in my past,
there in the valley

of the sheltering hill
where once there blossomed
so many flowers and other living things.

Twilight Song

sing
a twilight song
of radiance ending in magic
the beginning and end
of something

all things end
the sun is not imperishable
and gods come and go
some walk on earth awhile
and linger in our dreams
but all must die

tonight the setting sun
is pandemonium in
yellow and red and orange
sliding off the edge of
the far horizon

it will surely fall
maybe to rise again
or maybe not
and as it falls it sings:

remember me in my descent
in all my falling splendor
just in case
I’m never seen
again

In the Rising and Setting Sun

I too was a child
dancing to
lonely dawn and twilight song
and the music was shadow music
singing
in my song-wild childhood
and even now it sings
and it will sing
and sing again
till time runs out of song

At the Core

In the
moonless
starless
darkness
something is glowing:

though somewhere the moon is hiding
and stars despair their dimming
something is glowing.

Let me hide behind
silent brick walls
where I can wait
and wonder if
I’ll ever see
the radiance
at the core of darkness.

Bright Lights

from what we cannot hold the stars are made
—W.S. Merwin, Youth—

The stars are wilted and wan
and the Milky Way nostalgia,
unable to compete
with city razzle-dazzle.

I wonder
where radiance hides.
Is it still pulsing away
at the rim of our whirling blue world,
at the edge of sanity,
perhaps afraid to
signal us
that the gods cannot get through,
that we’re alone,
all alone
in our fine and brutal incandescence?