WAIRARAPA
The road
from Wellington
up into the Wairarapa
is a steep and winding road
through green as green as Irish envy
If you keep your eye
on the center line of the road
your breakfast may stay where you put it
If you look down
along the cliffs and crags
all the hardness wrapped in soft
to count the valley cows and sheep
your stomach will forgive you
tomorrow or the next day or the next
and you will always have today
LIGHT
The thing about light is that it never gets tired
Three million years at the speed of itself
from that star to here
without a slow day or a stop to complain
On the days that I remember
things move pretty well as well
THE GREAT CIRCLE
The children are piling the leaves again
ready for the next bare-limb leap
life into death and back
Beavers’ teeth never stop growing so they chew on wood to keep them at a manageable length. If they didn’t maintain them their teeth would eventually grow into their brains.
I shot a beaver in my youth
who cursed me with this curse
My teeth
will be your poems now
remembering our gift unused
grows fatal to the brain
WINDMILL FARMS
How many will it take to keep this thing in the air
ATHABASCA
Along the Icefields Parkway
(prettiest road in the world)
winding from Lake Louise to Jasper
lies a glacier that feeds three oceans
(Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic)
It takes a hundred years for a snowflake
falling on the top to make it to the bottom
Before a snowflake that falls today
finishes its journey the glacier may be gone
On the other side of the road in spring
water falls down a long face of rock
They call it the weeping wall
it may still be there
REINCARNATION BY LOON
Now there’s a sound
you could take anywhere
and remember when you returned
REINCARNATION BY CLOUD
Does the rain falling on us now
remember the palmed oasis
the emerald lake of the Rockies
the laughing over small stones
Hand in hand we stand
faces upward, wet with hope
PRAYERS
The frogs out back
are singing in the rain
Not like Gene Kelly
in the actual raining now
More like the brave
in Remington’s painting
standing alone on a hill
skull raised above his head
trying to conjure back the buffalo
Last week it worked for the frogs
SQUALL LINE
Coming across the fields – fast
dust running from the rain
It will be caught
its name will be mud