Sun on the Walls, Shade in the Door

Plain facts of a day’s light
In a dry land, no clouds
To smear the brush like art

With a grim, deft, old hand,
With a wheel of grey-blue
Hues to choose. Just the sun,

Stripped of most of its reds,
Wroth with what pale blue’s left.
Sun on walls. Shade in door,

Where the split pine, half dead
From the winds that tear it
Limb from limb, still throws dark.

That’s it. O, so much else
Goes on, just past this house,
Near and far. Some days smoke,

Some days knocks at strange hours,
A rare loss of power, wolves
In the forms of folks, howls

In the night from the road,
From the wild, from the world.
But in these hours? Shade. Sun.

You know they’ll come for us.
You know how things get done.
But in these hours? Shade. Sun.

Pall Comes Down with the Rush of a Storm

The wind blew hard all night.
The wind blows hard at dawn.
It does not mean a thing.

Words, one at a time, mean
More than the wind’s whole storm.
It’s just that what we mean,

All of us, all at once,
May have carved up the world
But lacks for the force

Of the spin that makes wind,
The star that burns the spin,
The night where it all ends.

Kur

The way it was in those days,
The towns fed on the low streams,
And their folk saw the high lands

More and more as far and strange,
The dark, smudged line at the edge
Of dawn that hid beasts and gods,

Not as lands once loved by them.
Souls in the towns saw the cliffs
As the weird source of great woods,

Dreams of fear and shades, the place
To bring a bronze axe and charms,
Where you sang spells to be safe.

We looked down on your burnt towns,
Your brick dust, your clay-fired tales.
But we heard songs, and we fell.

Few Poems Need Few Friends

Things change while you change.
Some change fast, some slow.
You may clock the change.
You may fret. Some things
Won’t change as you wished.

Words fly out so fast
They sound like a stream.
Who knows what we mean?
The stream knows—or knows
As much as the words.

Does this not strike you?
I use words to say
We think words are mute,
Dumb in the cruel sense.
I say so as words.

Time to climb back in
My small world. The flanks
Of the cliff, dull gold
As wheat in the sun,
Flick leaves down on me.

I won’t change as I
Wish. My words won’t think
On their own. Will they?
A new kind of doom,
Then, when the words change.

Things Want to Be Nice

The rough-barked small tree
That grows in the gut.
The Great Red Spot Storm
That we watch and watch.

The gold leaves that slip
And pile in the creek.
The gods, bees, and cows
That split up the sky.

The quire with eight times
As much space to write.
A set of wax plates.
Old poems in the mind.