Poems: Remembering the summer of 2008. For Jacob.

As rhythmic as the heartbeat of the world,

Cicadas sing the ceaseless shining light

Of stars who in their joyous dance have twirled

Before our time, above our ken, untouched by blight.

The shadowed treeline, unseen leaves unfurled

Blots out the stars: the sheerest edge of night

Where deepest black of the terrestrial

Abuts against the glory most celestial.

The whisperings of the ancient woods that loom

And bend their creaking, murmuring branches down

Around my father's house, by night, assume

A wind-borne woodland speech that lacks both verb and noun.

The dense and darkly brooding sylvan gloom

Once reached from here to where the breakers sound;

Through open bedroom windows in long-lost springs

It whispered old and wild and long-forgotten things.

I ask myself what rest a buck can find

In those eternities when lightnings crash:

A moment white, electrical and blind

With flailing, dripping foliage frozen in the flash.

Do they lay down on beds of settled pine

While Heaven's cannons boom and pound and smash

The ground, reducing trees to flying splinters,

Casting earthward shadows of their branching antlers?

I faced the trees, and she, the house; we sat

Together on my car and breathed the calm

Night air, and I caressed her, our half-wild cat,

Her feline fur beneath my hairless primate palm.

We hailed from different spheres, and that was that,

And yet we shared a seat without a qualm;

We knew (in different ways) the Up Above,

And shared an understanding, something much like love.

The trees around my building are controlled

From sapling up; they're pruned and trimmed and healed

Of willfulness, roots locked in asphalt's hold,

Beneath the awful gaze of towers of glass and steel.

The rules that govern us have left me cold,

As well, our chase of things that are not real;

Somewhere, the human enterprise went bad.

Poems