A sign of the times

 "Delineations" was first published in Able Muse, Volume 10, Winter 2010, and subsequently in my first collection Lines of Flight.

 

 

 

Delineations

 

Wild geese flee the coming cold and ice,

 sketching the sky with epic Vs;

no roundabout for these –

their route precise.

 

Starlings in formation never jostle –

            aggregates of living art,

                        together yet apart

                                    in graceful rustle.

 

Patterns of exuberant design,

            cadenza, cadence, wavelength, arrow,

                        slant or straight and narrow –

                                    theirs, mine.

                                   

 

 

One of my darker poems . . .

 First published in Frostwriting, Issue 12, 2014.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Vortex Street

the overhead wires sing and hum

plucked like strings

in tones composed by the vector sum

of the wind’s velocities

but in those resonant meanderings

harmony arpeggios

and all the world’s atrocities

and all the world’s worst-case scenarios

wail in the squalls

as into the maelstrom light curls swirls falls

 

"Though I sang in my chains like the sea" - One of my favorite poems - "Fern Hill"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To hear Dylan Thomas reciting his poem "Fern Hill" 

click HERE.

 

Fern Hill

Dylan Thomas

1914 – 1953

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
          On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
          I ran my heedless ways,
     My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
          Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

 

My favorite Robert Frost Poem: Reluctance

Majestic oak tree at autumn sunset

 

 

 

 

To hear Robert Frost reciting Reluctance, click HERE. 

 

 Reluctance

By Robert Frost

 

 

Out through the fields and the woods

   And over the walls I have wended;

I have climbed the hills of view

   And looked at the world, and descended;

I have come by the highway home,

   And lo, it is ended.

 

The leaves are all dead on the ground,

   Save those that the oak is keeping

To ravel them one by one

   And let them go scraping and creeping

Out over the crusted snow,

   When others are sleeping.

 

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,

   No longer blown hither and thither;

The last lone aster is gone;

   The flowers of the witch hazel wither;

The heart is still aching to seek,

   But the feet question ‘Whither?’

 

Ah, when to the heart of man

   Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

   To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

   Of a love or a season?

My Sonnet About Sonnets

I bought a copy of this book in 1967. I still have it.

Sonnet Love

 

I love the way its rhythm and its rhymes

provide us with a promise, a belief

familiar voices at specific times

may modulate unmanageable grief.

 

I love the way we’re called to referee

the mind-heart match-up in its scanty ring;

how through it all our only guarantee

is that for fourteen rounds the ropes will sing.

 

I love the way it makes us feel at home,

the way it welcomes fugitives and fools

who have forgotten all roads lead to Rome

from shared beginnings in the tidal pools.

 

Life’s unpredictability defies

clean dénouement. I love the way it tries.

 

 

 

P.S. My favorite sonnet by Millay begins: "Time does not bring relief; you all have lied"

 

My October Poem

A segue from my poem "Elderberry Tale", this is one of my Petrarchan sonnets, written in slant rhyme. 

It was first published in The Lyric (Volume 97, Number 4, Fall 2017) and is the title poem and final poem of my book, Pointing Home (Kelsay Books, 2019).

 

A typical Pennsylvania landscape in autumn.

 

 

 

 

 

Pointing Home

 

All things on earth point home in old October:

 sailors to sea, travelers to walls and fences,

hunters to field and hollow and the long voice

of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.

           

—Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River 

 

 

In expectation of approaching winter,

a woodchuck slips into his grass-lined burrow;

the fall migration of the vesper sparrow

begins, as afternoons grow shorter, fainter.

The blood moon of the Abenaki hunter

wanes, as mercury glissades toward zero:

apprentice to the North, I’ll need to borrow

the mettle of a born and bred Vermonter.

 

And so, when mountain winds conspire to wither

asters, mums and marigolds; as mice

prepare their cellar nests; before snow flurries

sweep against the windowpanes, I gather

pitch-pine kindling for the fireplace,

and from the riverbank, late elderberries.

 

 

 

Elderberry Tale

 

In loving memory of my maternal Granny.

 

Elderberry Tale

 

Once upon a time at summer’s end,

without specific plans to fill my day,

I sauntered to her house. I would pretend

I’d never heard the stories of the way

 

the week divided into different chores.

Her gravel voice and knotted hands explained

the wringing of the wash, the hard-scrubbed floors,

the kneading and the knitting. As she strained

 

the mash of berries, crimson droplets bled

in trickles to a saucepan on the stove.

The secret’s in the knowing how, she said,

to measure sugar, cinnamon and clove.

 

For happily-ever-afters, her advice

has come in handy. As I stir my brew –

the cauldron simmering with sweet and spice –

I add a pinch of snail, a frog or two.

 

Nuit blanche

 

 

White Night, by Edvard Munch, 1901

White Night

 

Minutes. Hours. Darkness pressing   

through the window. Not a breeze.   

Freight trains at the level crossing                

wail and goad my turning, tossing.               

Lurid ciphers lengthen, glossing                                

over time’s hypotheses.            

Night attends my second-guessing    

days we were not meant to seize.

 

Background poem for my latest book

Based on a true story. Annals of the Dear Unknown is available from Kelsay Books, or from the author (me!).

I loved researching and writing this book. At some point in the future I will be posting each of the 28 chapters.

 

Taking Stock 

 

By the middle of the twentieth century,

“King Coal” had been dethroned by natural gas

and oil. In a place tagged Diamond City,

daily life had lost much of its luster.

But to the sad eyes of a little girl,

taking in the glitz of movie house

marquees mirrored in the rain-slicked street

of Public Square that blustery April night,

her Trailways slowly rolling toward the station,

Wilkes-Barre spangled, scintillated, shone.

 

 

No one had told the little girl, back then,

that Yankee blood was coursing through her veins,

nor that the subject of the “Doodle” ditty

had anything at all to do with Rose,

the woman sitting stern and ramrod straight

in that old gilt-framed sepia photograph

hanging on an uncle’s parlor wall.

It was the present moment, nothing more―

a father far away with polio.

A North-End double-block A soothing thumb.

 

 

That night, the little girl slept unaware

that over nine-score years had come and gone

since Rachel Tyler Munson was interred,

unmarked, along the Susquehanna’s banks,

her children fleeing for their lives; a time

when Eton Jones would chip the glistening rock

from local outcrops for his blacksmith forge,

long before the Knox Mine tragedy.

A time when rival passions for the land

burned like the hot blue flame of anthracite.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spring has arrived in Uruguay!

 

Ostensibly about the "hornero" (as the ovenbird is called in Uruguay), the last two lines of this intricate Spenserian sonnet give a clue to my thoughts on free verse.

 

The Ovenbird

In Uruguay, in spring, I’ve often heard

lighthearted trills along a dusty road:

the lively, undiminished ovenbird

sings as she builds her intricate abode.

The wily swallow, with no stringent code

of constancy, surveys the chambered nest;

and knows that, following this episode

of eggs with which the other bird is blessed,

he’ll snatch the abdicated space. Hard-pressed

though he may be for time, for love, for will,

too wise to prove an uninvited guest,

he waits it out upon a windowsill.

The ovenbird, deemed artless by the swallow,

to practiced eyes is one tough act to follow.