POEM: To The Slaughter

The terror of a sliding down life
Is the fear of a diminished heart.
It lifts and falls in muted movement
Like November clouds straining sun.
The hard, red stone that is my heart
Counts seconds as a reflex
That is want, ticking off the great suck
That are our most frantic dreams
Like running in water, or losing all our teeth.

Though. . .

I remember love
I know beauty
For these things sing in me
When I can recognize the tune.

But strong is your hold on me, immortal guest,
Fearful is the gravity of your mass.
The lamb offers her blinding white fleece
To the omnipresent future of the bloody vest.
My overcast spirit shuffles off to the slaughter
Where all of me is buried hard and deep
For the next lambing year,
Where everything is reticent and held at bay,
My God, my God – how again will sun ever recognize the day?

POEM: Taylor's Notch

Desiccate stalks of browning corn
Like good New England congregants stand
Reserved to listen to cool October reveal her secrets in slant light,
Each stalk whispers to the other and watches me
Ascend through stained glass daylight,
While I process up a foliate cathedral aisle ,
Boots scraped hardscrabble clean, rough hewn by
Razor sharp volcanic stone,
I climb the top of Taylor’s Notch
Transfigured by the solitude,
Reformed by pulsing blood sluicing through my ears
My breath etching the smooth plate glass of cool air.
I lean into the stern steep slope
That is the mountain leaning back against me.

At the top, incendiary Autumn is hard at work,
Like the black-faced statues on Easter Island,
I am watched by everything.
Every saw-toothed oak leaf, singed lightly
Around the edges, is ready to combust.
These are the colors trees are meant to be.
The chlorophyll just hides it all, like makeup,
Covering over summer’s gluttony:
The ochres so uninhibited; the yellows so unashamed,
Sumac’s harried shades of red and
Maple’s frantic orange try to keep a frantic pace
An ocean of tactile colors yet unnamed swirls below me-
Trees dance to the music of what they truly are
Without any remorse or one single embarrassed movement.

I have forgotten the chlorophyll that courses
Through the miles of my networked veins.

What colors lie within me?
What hues nestle deep beneath my skin-line?
What truths once drained of all my wanting
Will bubble up before me here
On Taylor’s Notch, before a prim audience
Of erect yellow pine and hemlock
And the quiet song that is the Holy West wind?

POEM: Nov 4, 2008

The change we've sought for too long
has come at last.
Let it leak inward, and destroy our masks.
Let it end the bleak, corrosive moments,
Let us be forgetful of mean things said.
Let it bring life to the hearts of the dead.
For we each one of us needs the other,
so become a sister, and become a brother.
To work is to be free, so be free and live!
And then?
Forgive,
Forgive,
Forgive,
Forgive.