Break the Circle
I went walking by the harbor As the day went down to dark. I went searching through my sorrows For a place to rest my heart. Will the circle be unbroken By and by? By and by? Is a better home awaiting In the sky, Lord, in the sky? There...
The Sun's Funeral
The iron of the road was grey And greyer was the sky. The sun showed not a single ray, So damned the way and damned the day That Gawain went to die. I was late to the wedding. Twas whose I barely knew; They had asked me out of kindness, as...
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...