Friday, June 29, 2018

Friday, June 22, 2018

Down and Up


The steep, exceeding footfalls, lunging
weight of self, comes with vacillation:
to mosey higher trails or plumb the forest hill,
wend tree horns, creek trickle, mud-hovering
mosquito knot; skunk lilies in the shade's green paddles,
whence the turn-back clambering, weight of self.

Rotting stumps and the down-thrust paths diminish
then find themselves again over barring,
long-fallen trees and muck and face-found webs
in the thickening heat. More rotting stumps
and lean-to trees; one-man passages
and some half-a-man-without-a-head.

Sometimes in an opening along the slope
a lifting of the quandary midst its ropes
has you hear: hugely secretive and busily
pitching voices from end to end. An old car is down there
thicketed near occasional drip drip
down from a level way that once was a backroad
or driveway - for what and to where, swallowed.

Burnt trees like steeples of charcoal
are down there. Splintered and toppled crops
of stricken boles are down there - and birds
like water-skipped stones, recklessly
over the down there under-story,
singing, shooting, stone-and-tree clear,
chip, chip, chip. A whale boulder that can have
a dozen people is limply hidden, wearing moss,
beached from an old ocean's cataclysm.

In the evaporated swamp, gathering sump,
pocked pinnacles of termite sponge
engulfed in leaf recesses; the grub homes
that the woodpecker opens up;
and the standing figure not trunk
between two trunks: broad-shouldered, dun,
housed in matted growth, could begin loping
on long legs, thrice man-pace, steadily toward you
from below, robe burning dark with living animal,

revealing unreal teeth, the guttural grunting growl:
man of the bears and wolves,
feral and stinking where you just stood,
out from the growing, rotting lairs;
odiferous wild man of the woods.
When evening light is out of the woods,
up there's out of: lifted weight of self
in airy, fulsome sunsets. Up there's out.
Green walnut's skin, bats and dragonflies;
dusk-downed llamas, cattle in the lidless fields.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Monday, June 11, 2018

Sunday, June 10, 2018

Thursday, June 7, 2018

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Sunday, June 3, 2018