Colony Collapse Disorder
I hunted with the children of the sun Who hunt the liquid gold. I saw them turn, Like furnace sparks made flesh, to rise and run As swift as their sun's rays that ever burn, To take pursuit again. I saw their stores Stuffed but to bursting...
Ballade on Leavetaking
I saw a hilltop, years ago Half-toppled with continuous gust, And every time that breeze would blow- This is not boring you, I trust- The grass reached up in wanderlust For where the wind and I would track. My shoes still smell of that...
Haunted Ballade
Where is the home that once I knew, that stood Deep in the meadow drifts, encircled nigh With tender orchard groves, then emerald woods That slumbered as the summer clouds slipped by? Beneath the twisted briars those meadows lie. The fallow...
Ballade Against Cheesemongery
The grocer's, for $6.95 per pound Harvarti sells, in blocks of creamy beige Bespeckled with unthinkables (well ground Or crushed) like nuts, or wine, or sage And rosemary. At this I briefly rage Then pass it o'er for cheap varieties My...
Ballade of the Recently Dispossessed
I planted apple trees between the shadow of the pines I lit the lanterns, scrubbed the sun-starved windows of their scum For aye, this house was emptiness, and this home would be mine But promises are lies and jests when truth with autumn comes. ...
The Cheshire Cat
The glint you glimpse may be the twilight sun Between the shadow trees, or on the lawn All unproportioned, where the wild winds run Grotesquely. Or it may be me, all gone. Beneath wide hedges, wider nothings yawn, And nothing's more nothing...
Scattered Thundershowers This Afternoon
The forecast didn't call for principalities and powers. In toppling heaps of alabaster balanced overhead They hung, silently swelling, for apprehensive hours, Filled full with holy water and rejuvenating dread. Somebody called down judgment on...
Ballade of Three Birds
The morning miles of liquid cold that hang between the spheres Will bear you up forever, but will not veil your eyes. The clear wind and the clouded and the misted wind that mirrors Will show you every corner of the old hills that they clean. ...
Autumn Interrupts
It's easy to forget what autumn means In tired lands of sun-stuffed tedium; Assassin breeze the blackfly never weans, The forecast is extremely medium. It's easy to forget those ragged skies Crushed, throttled, splintered by the frigid light ...
The Starling Master
Amid the mid-air rushing the Starling Master stands Invisible to every eye not of his feathered kin. The starlings wheel around him to his soundless swift commands, Above, beneath, beside him they rush out and they rush in, In orbit all about him...
The Past is the Opposite Shallows
The past is the opposite shallows of a river at flood to the lip. And swift do the rapids swallow. And swift are the tides that rip. And that which the past generations have builded on seeming stone Is crumbled in deep desolations, and carried away...
The Sisters of Vengeance
Oh the sisters of vengeance they have not forgotten or fled. I see them still watching the stormclouds that hang overhead. And they told me my fortune and someday I'll know what they said, Though I hope it won't matter until I've been many years...