Mercy

The inscrutable face of the god
Who has neither face nor divinity
Peers from the clinquant surface

Of a lake in a late autumn sun.
Nothing belated about that glance
From the hard world into the dark

Heart of the mind without one thought
Capable of diminishing the glare
Reflected from the shrug of the god

Who tosses the mane of the world, which is
Why the mind welcomes and retreats in the face
Of its own confusion from that look.

And yet, nonetheless, but still
Stammers the songbird on the bare
Branch of the tree near the lake's edge,

Out of that emotionless shimmering,
That sum of too many minuscule waves,
From above and below and across

Comes occasionally a mercy,
The appearance of a mist, gentle
Rain from heaven evaporating

On contact with the certainty
That it was not meant to be,
Was too kind, too generous, and yet,

Nonetheless, but still, it is.
It has taken its place in the happening,
This wink of the shield-bright countenance.

Jeux

We're playing games in the woods,
Hide and seek in root and trunk,
Toads, chipmunks, crickets, and stones.

The sun is low but brilliant,
Shafting through the buttresses
Of memory, supporting

What? A crown of mere twig tips,
A sky that doesn't need help?
The fabulous monster prowls

Among ordinary beasts
And orchestrates our small lives
As games that are that monster.

The Need for Disenchantment

When things grow dense over the land,
The odd thicket or coppice meant
For quick cropping hardly stands out
As being just right for stopping
Forward progress through enchantments
That keep us from our place of rest.
But the secret of enchantment
Is that we can't quite resist it,

Can't recognize the barrier
To home is this magic we prize,
Can't keep our thoughts from rooting down
Through the tangle of what is not,
Can't see the trees for the forest,
The frost harvest under the leaves.

The Endowment

"There is no known cure for the ills of ownership."

I will go down with this damn it,
Because I made myself from it
In the first place. These woods are mine
My commons, my comedy, mine

By the divine right of effort,
Unstinting tilting, assorted
Sawmills and hollows, open glades
And small brooks babbling in the shade.

I'm not far enough gone in thought
To deny that these woods are not
Intrinsically more valuable
Than anyone else's baubles,

But because they're mine, I made them,
That poor thing, my mind, parades them
As if it were them, which it's not,
Although they are it, as it thought.

Hoodoo Sunrise

Shadows stepped out
Of the trees and approached
The cliff as the light grew.

Despite some red,
Clouds blocked the glory
And dawn came cold and grey.

The shadows grumbled
And conferred, whether
Any hope of magic remained,

Some having traveled
A long way for this, before
They rejoined the stones.

Shape Is a Word

"What shape is a mountain, a coastline, a river?... Questions once reserved for poets and children."
~Benoit Mandelbrot

What shape is an equation
Describing a dark forest
Torn here and there with questions
Mathematicians have left
Behind them, empty with light?

The rough and complicated
Repetition of edges
Aphorisms generate
Approximate a known world
That I know is not this world,

Just another pretty park
Contrived of regulations,
A fraction of a whole song,
A metaphor of a bridge
Insisted in wilderness.

What shape is a word, our ghosts
Veiled in the down pouring rain,
Legs and wings in constant drone,
Tangled singing from pure throats?
Frantic signals hide the sign.

Simpler

"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler."

This sky can't possibly be,
Horizon to horizon
Blue that only I can see,

Whittled to the bare untruth
Of an elegant wisdom,
A sharp, polished serpent's tooth

That slices in so neatly
To deliver its venom
So infinitely sweetly

It feels unfair to complain
That a beauty so common
And plain as the sky brings pain.