SUNDAY DRIVE
It has been fifty below all week.
Behind my cabin a moose and her calf
huddle in deep snow, moving little.
I am glad for the small wood stove,
the neatly stacked cord of spruce outside.
But not all things will survive this cold.
A child and her grandparents died last night
when their car stranded in a snowdrift
on a backcountry road. It was dark
when the engine at last ran out of gas
and they began to walk a glacial earth
under heaven's hapless stars
and a hook of arctic moon--
ten miles through a savage wind
breaking bones in its teeth
and the soul of a young child crying.
I turn from the window, stoke the rattling fire,
and say a small prayer for all things living.
MILEPOSTS
Like mileposts, graves mark distances
between our villages.
Already this summer two cousins drunk on a curve;
an old man, teetering along a twisted highway,
eyes dim with gin;
and an infant crushed unrecognizable at his home.
As the sun wheels across a sheer sky
I stand in the heat of a great unbalanced day
and watch ripples of salmon shambling upriver--
spirits of ancestors ruffling the surface
on their journey home.
In the distance a swaggering car approaches
shining like the beautiful black steel of old guns.
.
FOR ALLEN GINSBERG
Your generation
is older,
many of their
best poets
are dead.
The poems
of my generation are
slight, restive,
lacking depth
& nerve.
I meant to call
yesterday, as if
I somehow knew
your flow of silence
would soon begin.
I run out
(a poet alone)
below dark clouds
unfurling towards night,
tell them a light is coming.
.
THE SNOW HAS NO VOICE
after Sylvia Plath
But I hear it on this speckled mountain
miles from my cabin door.
I hear its falling in a perturbation of light
& and watch the bare incoming
storming up slopes of cloud-torn peaks
in a cargo of wind
passing through lithe boughs of pine
like a prayer.
In an hour I will be home,
but here a peeling wind carries snow
like sparks struck from flint
above a snowy ridge
where stars measure
the path of the moon
and a pure flesh of new snow
lies outstretched like bones below.
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