Abiding Time
A sample of previously published poems
from Sewanee Review, Volume 124, Number 4, Fall 2016, pp. 597-599
Four Short Poems with Trees
1.
The clouds have come down,
the trees stick in them
like pins. Water chatters
at the lake-mouth, down
the stepped spill-
way of the dam. It makes a kind
of amphitheater, you note—
to play small tragedies.
All's blurred as Ophelia
but for a V of geese, their broken
lines dividing cloud
and cloud, identical flyways
healing in their wake.
2.
Still world, movement,
hummingbirds and finches
squabbling at the feeders.
And the green of the winter fairway,
an alley of firs where
the groundskeeper drives
his little paradise machine
preparing the way
for a hopscotch of bushtits, a white-
crowned sparrow noodling
at a branch, juncos gamboling
at the base of the feeder.
The tips of the firs befogged.
The world goes on, one
cracked husk then another.
3.
Today the treetops are on fire—
a foolish charioteer too close to Earth.
The angle of it warms or burns us.
Help me to see to be repeated daily.
When necessary, teach me the science.
4.
The child under the pines is gathering
cones, cradling them, his free hand
adding more. For each two added
three fall out. Still, he pursues this project
with a reformer's zeal. This little park
five times a day fills like a bellows
with passengers waiting for a ferry.
And at a single blast from the bay,
the boy is gathered by his father
who is gathered by the crowd. A scatter
of pinecones under the tree. Let us be
gathered, they say, let us
raise ourselves soundlessly reaching
for the luff and lift of overcast skies.
from Image, Issue 83
Ex Nihilo, Then Us
From nothing God made everything, they said.
Nothing plus God is nothing we said. But with something to work with, look what we've done.
God said, you'd better and you'd better not, they said. And sometimes it looks like you have when you shouldn't.
Eyewash, we said, it's just how we are, honeyed self-interest in the milk of human kindness, and when something goes wrong, we fix it.
He is our formal and our final cause and rest. In him we shall not want.
We sang, oneself, in our wants each of us holy. And stood transfixed as desire crowned like wildfire leaping oceans. Some stood tall as a house, others drowning.
What the hell, we said. And so it came about that all things good and beautiful henceforth were called outrage on the bodies of the oppressed. And look, we said, at what we're doing about it.
Talking, they said. And look at what God has done, meaning the tragic beauty of the world.