for Charlie Knauss

‘Word merchant‘, ‘big talker‘, ‘word man‘, ‘rather talk
      than eat‘, are names given he whose sandstorms
of syllables darkened the lightness or lightened the
      darkness of conversations aimed at either lyrical,
or philosophical impulse, about life’s genial quirks
      and oddities, or icy blasts of scientific research.

He holds truths poetically alive with atoms changing
      and rearranging a stream of words that plunder
and soothe in his love of challenge, his chisel’s love
      of the stone. Listening in sentences, he responds

in paragraphs, equally comfortable with mortal or
      spiritual enigmas, thriving on mythology’s higher
gods and history’s lower aims. He wears openly
      the scarfskin of his love affair with himself, and his
fear of the ‘other’ in his psyche. He survives on an
      implacable faith in non-conformity, perfume drunk

on the ‘ambivalence of ambiguity’ that calls him to
      the river’s edge below the trees, where he bends
low on creaky football knees to skip flat stones out
      across moon-ribboned water — long side-arm throws,

sometimes skimming so freely the stone is free as
      light. Moonlight on water swelling an imagination
taken from gauzy memory and a mother’s faith that
      “the soul is both your judge and your sanctuary”,
faith he rode like skiffs of snow over wintry roads, never
      sure if opinion or challenge was more important.

He disappeared in the dead of winter… the brooks
all frozen and the airports almost deserted…
W.H. Auden

float across chilly October mornings in St. Remy,
singing your friendship out across the fields where
last summer’s Lavender and Sunflower blooms

chased the sun from horizon to horizon. Like Gypsy
singers they sing their bright sadness into stillness
coaxing leaves to desert their holy attachment to

another season on the branches of Van Gogh’s
delicate Olive trees and Avignon’s white Sycamores,
and join the great loneliness of orange moons sifting

through midnight silence of granite valleys, throbbing
with the dream songs you found in Modigliani and
Baudelaire, with the ‘City of Atlantis’ shining from

your face. The future waits in early morning light,
rising on the backs of leafless mountains arched into
the deep and endless blue of afternoon skies en

automne, while dutiful Cicada wheeze their madrigal
melancholy into stillness so large it doubles the loss
of your hungry eyes, always seeking how much of

God was in you, and in all that sang outside of you.
Like that ache in the singer’s voice trying to give
back to words the emotion they’ve lost to logic

and common sense, you took back from the vagaries
of memory’s iron wind, the spiritual grace of love
that doesn’t need to be earned or deserved.

for Edwin Clarke
(1962-1996)

that curve round the house like a Priest’s
    surplice, before descending to a mountain
stream in the hollow, where massive boulders,

heaved up from the earth long ago, make
    deep pools beside white water thrust against
granite. Inuits believe snow has many voices

and snow sticking to only one surface might
    be a voice ‘gently speaking’, a sign of grace,
or maybe ‘the narrowness of the gate’. Next

spring when I walk the trails through rough
    terrain in a Monk’s devotion to clear away
and repair winter’s ravage, I’ll guide my old

yellow wheelbarrow full of woodchips with an
    acolyte’s grip as I spread them, trying to keep
weeds, slices of stone chipped off by freeze

and thaw and hard January winds’ breaking
    branches that make fugitive, trails a snow’s
hoary crest seemed to pledge my protection

against anything keeping them from blessings
    they offer to the mystery of a soul in its rising.

for Agnethe and Jorgen

For two minutes that felt like all of my life, after lunch
with friends on the Serena stone terrace of an

ancient farmhouse near Siena…soft syllables of voices
floating on languid Tuscan light…all my desire

to know surrendering to the hymnic drowse of Cicadas
in the long grass…all thought buried in the Bells

of Buonconvento rising from the valley below…brown-
eyed Sunflowers chasing the sun that saturates

everything in its color…the mind sliding away on
revenant waves of unbound light and the stillness

of love that multiplies the self, embracing me like
some Etruscan Deity, quelling the mad rabbit that

thrashes inside of me, and I am ready to gamble
the future on the velvet flush of Mourning Doves

from an Olive grove below until the razor cries
of keening hawks─hovering in their life of circle

and search─gave back all my years.

comes like the evergreen motion of spring, makes this boy
      who lives twenty five miles from anyone his age, his own
best friend, makes May’s bright blue air…red pools of water
                  on red-dirt roads and a mud dirty dog running beside

him biting the air in celebration, his reason to be in this sense-
                drenched, sun-warmed spirit of the earth in revolution…

sharing the dog’s delight to be alive, singing it in the endless
      soprano syllables releasing winter from a dry brown silence,
and terrible loneliness of its stores of ice and snow. Love
                  loose again on the ‘Snowy Range’, he sings out his

faith in the future to his mother…wanna’ see me empty
        the mud puddle…wanna see me jump the dog…wanna’

see me do a wheelie…staccato syllables slicing the air like
      “Laramie River’s” priapic thrust down glistening flanks
of canyon walls, percussive rhythms seeking the inexhaustible
                  mouth of high mountain meadows, expectations

swelling in the sweet ache of spring calling them to more,
      more, more…nothing but the future he declaims when he

falls, “…didn’t hurt, wanna’ see me do it again!” everything
          out in front, begging them to chase the sky blue butterfly,
delighted with the mystery of things they can’t catch, and
                  the river’s wild freedom, flinging a fence post as if a leaf,

one he helped his father make secure with dirt and wire up
      river—free again to make jazz impressions upon the eye,

as it surges back in time—joining chaste green beginnings
        of sense-drenched, sun-warmed spirit of bright blue skies
surging toward the exaggerated glory of autumn, already growing
               in dark red buds waiting in wet black branches of trees.

(for Paul “Wolf” Larsen)

Born in a town where dogs were mongrels
milk cows were skinny-uddered slaughter-house
cattle, and farmers scratched out survival
on gully-rigged farms best-suited for cattle grass,
Coyotes, Russian Thistle and Prairie Dogs,

farms where I stacked bales in haymows
of airless barns, town where at Sunday Church
I sat beside auburn-haired Shirley Franzen with skin
so white and lips so red, I gave myself frequently
to the Jesus of her fevered faith, even though I believed
mostly in my father’s faith in his own two hands.

At sixteen I believed in football, girls and
people as true to habit as to love itself,
all of us fed by the purity of artesian water
pouring into the “Big Sandy River,” spring water
filling the blackened Steam Engines of Union Pacific
Freight trains, smoke stacks billowing great white
clouds of expectation out into blank blue skies running
high over grazing cattle, smooth-hipped horses
standing close, nickering into a vast prairie silence.

Sometimes I’d put my ear to the rail
trying to hear before I could see a train…
sometimes I’d balance walk a rail all the way
to the curve round Busing’s pasture —
a quarter mile without stepping off — “Big Sandy River”
on one side of me and Levi Landkammar’s haystacks
on the other, as though innocence was earned
in that place where perseverance smoothed
the imperatives of everyday existence — 
protection from darkness within and without. 

She eased out of a group celebrating a fiftieth
   high school reunion — her wide set and still blue
eyes taking me in an instant back to summer
   glazed bodies swimming away whole afternoons

at a bend in the Sandy River in John Yoakim’s
   pasture, where current cut a hole deep enough to
swim, where silk black river bottom land grew dark
   green corn behind us, and wild plums in the fence

row between, released sweet juice of rose colored
   flesh, sliding mouth to breast, feeding the madness
of sixteen in a 1936 Chevrolet after November foot-
   ball games, without a heater on a dirt road running

under twin rows of Chinese Elm and Sugar Maple,
   one mile with no farm houses… her smiles in Algebra
class making me forget how much I hated Miss Heiser
   and algebra.  First serious girlfriend, first voice

questing beyond the gentle mediocrity of a prairie
   village, virgin dreams like paths to larger rivers — but
as she slid into my arms, she whispered, “Oh Larsen,
   you weren’t supposed to get old” — words falling like

blood upon snow, only the tremor in her cadence ma-
   king the voice play harlot to memory’s lust, tremor
fighting valley winds for the high ridges, the flute’s
   adagio celebrating by her witness to another time,

last salt kingdom of the wild heart’s wings flying blank
   blue skies  re-collecting scattered dreams of faces
fallen to bone — wound revealing the truest self.

Passion Contents

Blustery morning winds
are driving low lying clouds
and three days of drizzling rain
into a gap in West Virginia mountains,
and I walk my dog under an autumn sky
so perfectly blue no words can hold it.

I’d like to hold this moment though,
the way my wife holds fragrance
in dried leaves she keeps in a dish
on her vanity, but the dog cares nothing
about past or future, invisible center
pulling hard against the leash

— all nose now —
brain gorged by smells far
beyond my imagining, enough
to quiver sagging lips of half-bark
dreams he’ll dream in front of winter fires.

Once a look, a word, a girl’s hand
at the movies was kiss enough to run
the length of me… now I caress the pull
of the dog’s desire against my hand, hoping
his delight and this last salt cry of autumn will

bring back bright red shoes walking
away from me when she was seventeen,
carrying the earth and the sky in her hand.

Passion Contents