Father Atonement

I keep listening
for your voice
in the hollows
beneath the redbud
branches you loosed
from their bindings -
a planting too soon
in the ground for flowers
but not too soon for watching
how its deep-pink-from-bone-fingers
tree a gray and awkward sky.

Missed Explanations of the Way

November washes over
the stone lip of a mountain
spring, cold like my hand
is cold, slicked with layers
of wishing for numbed
silence and a delicate,
wandering edge, then
words without memory,
or heat, open my mouth
as if to tell what should be,
but shrivel under the clear
burn of evergreen, the snap
under boot, so I swallow
hard and live anyway.

Pausing for a Moment, I Lay down the Biography I’m Reading

A certain silence in the fields, too much, too little -
The motion of the hand finds its own way.
I give up thinking.
*
Over the backyard,
wind on the deck bench riffles the pages of a book.
Clouds devour the story.
Fly in the misery of its fever,
fern branches speaking -
The dog, a cricket, the neighbor sharpening
his mower blade, waiting for dew to lift.
Everything this morning is distance.
*
Sparrows overhead streak north,
not confused, but determined
in their need to create order,
so I make plans for a weeping cherry
when the sap begins to run.

A Summer Dinner

Start with the taste - scarlet sage
to creeping phlox to fireweed.
And the far mountain rain lets go,
sheet upon sheet, such a tremble
through redbud leaves.
Fingers, with fork and bread,
deliver their sermon.
Then the planks begin to spot.

Mountain Verse

Someone tried to build a fence here,
a line that says there is always the other.
The one post is dislodged.
Under stands
of pine & spruce & chestnut, water pours
from some dark certainty of earth
with deep smells of myth in its belly,
spills
down the ridge a soaked quilt of stones,
smooth and moss-covered.
Past rusted wire
that spans the creek, mountain laurels lift
hosanna from the cool tangles of green and brown,
empty their bodies to this holiness, into a dust of sky
that settles its waiting down steep walls of blue,
as perfect an afternoon as can be lived.