Pruning In January

Wind upending dust.
Grass flat under time past,
Time future, us --souls at
The back fence freed, petals
From probability.
I would rather be
That -- rose mounded
On itself, frenzied--
Than pruned into
Ornament, wondering
In bone meal and bullshit
Where freedom went.

Pondscaping

Horsetail, parrotfeather,
Papyrus, angles, directions
Pinioned under algae, clouds,
Summer stars.
Where we are:
Compass seeks north or
Closest bars in an
Iron cage, but this is
An age of dreams.
A compass dreamed
Seeks a dreamed north,
A course imagined
Where thought gathers
Before dawn, our
Best bearing --
A path to take.
Where dream and reality
Coincide, we wake.

Time Wave

Where form fills this
Pull of potential,
Here, rain falls.
Rain falls on what
Will be because
Rain fell.

Life, shrunken nearly
To nothing, soaks, sprouts,
Stretches, ages.
Old bark ridges,
Cuts of other seasons,
Things in soil and reason
Endure

Between bricks,
Snails fossilized,
Ideas gone dead.
Worms, bees, moles,
Treefrogs clutched
In a broken cup

Don't care what time
It is here and
To a gardener being
A year --or a million--
Arrears is about
Like caught up.

Time Again

We can arrange approximations
Into things that work.
You're another.
Exactness is what remains
After tolerance falls to zero,
Which can't be done exactly.
Barometer bottoms out,
The valley breathes again.
In checked logs lizards,
Dreamless, forget everything.

Cosmos

Does it feel eyes focus
On a foggy night,
Corona close around the moon,
Dew drip like clockwork
Under eaves, what I hear,
See, what I believe
Beside this house in
Mist and night and outward,
Ever, where gravity and light
Travel and galactic dawns
Subtend the end of time?
A machine of echoes:
Immensities turn
On irreducibles.
In this coldness, haven,
Crucible, all parts fit
And it knows me.
I am made of it.

Sundial

Ant on an
Analemma gnomon
Climbs a code
Across light,
Across seasons
When color reclaims
This old gray road.
It too may
Overlay itself for
All I know.
Things come, go.
Things do.
New lives enter.
I like winter,
Don't you?

On A Bridge

I am amazed at
What things mean.
Devices, by which
The impossible is
Seen, surround the soul.
What is secret when
Wind, rattling in reeds,
Repeats what is
Whispered in a hole?