Late November

Small wind flexing
stale breath of softened fall
ready to harden into winter
Last tender water song
and the sun strong through clouds

Two days till December
a tenacious window holds
summer's friction, sand's mold
and the dog just looking

Comfortable on a high perch,
give of the dune ridge
and tumble of last softened days
into the columns of deep water:
developing cold

First Fly

When, this morning
I heard the fly on its zigzagging flight
across the plane above my bed,
toward the square of light at the window,
lurched into motion after lingering --
where? --
I remembered the buzz,
how it sawed its way
into my sleep,
a pure finger of reality
into my dream

And I was thinking, though asleep,
it's April,
early for this fly to be here
inciting a vein of irritation to thrum,
melting the pure surface of slumber
to set its spindly legs on my nerves

March Begins

And the light of course
is changed
But still the grime-covered mounds
of icy snow
like great beasts of winter
slumbering roadside

My first glimpse
of the unsure morning sun
a gulp of well-being
its latent strength recalling
elastic days of spring and summer,
the saturated days of fall

Driving home,
late afternoon
winter into spring
when the light holds out
just a little bit more each day

Pale moon
in wan sky
round exhale
of my exhaustion

This winter of icy vestiges
collecting filth
a journey from hopeful
to unspun
thin threads too wispy
for fingers too cold
to catch

April

Things are gentle again
Even the ripples rolling onto shore
are languid,
a loving tongue,
sure footstep,
a splayed hand

I am barefoot on the sand,
unlovely,
tracking a child's foot,
a dog's

The night birds --
are they only shadows,
figments of the space between dusk
and night --
begin to flit,
upland cedar,
the ragged black branches
I once sketched in pastel,
unaware of my future

Trip to the vernal pond
to hear the mammalian-throated frogs,
chaser of peepers,
Brazilian beat

New tulips, dainty,
and the trees in their new red buds, brushy-tipped

When life was still flush with the swell
of beginnings,
edges blurred by choices,
I carried them in handfuls,
a bouquet

Winter to Spring

In the morning the birds
and the light of green rising to the surface of the grass
through the snow-sodden earth
Some days a luminous light
like the locked-together molecules of winter air have burst apart,
everything whirling,
not yet locked back together in the thickness of summer
Winter at ground level
but the light at the treetops is beginning to shine

Lines from Sleep

A patchy building held together by the tendrils of the lives lived within it