Derivative and apropos at sun up and rust.
Down the gradient of time’s hill, all hills
With a stone to mark and a brook and the grass and the sky.

Hawks and grubs
Testing the trees,
The Winter ice and sonnet forms,
Granite wash and gravel
In a setting of poplars and morning
Set to name her favorites
When all the others have gone.

All done
In verisimilitude, in attitude of embrace and
Wind whistling the empty grotto,
The tumultuous past now quiet and present.
Take us green as we are,
Harvest of unclear purpose
Laying in the stacks and bags.
What terrible times we can imagine
In needing such things to come to us
In the whispers of the rafters,
In the leaf litter of the brush
Where bird feet and mammal sniffers
Make the noise of kinds and types,
Amplitudes and lasting quality.

If you call the poets from their dens,
Become the sleepless moan and long soul of their nights,
Tying ribbons of mist in rainbow greys around the moon,
The beams, the cliches, the derivative mystery of their votive offering,
Sputtering candle in the snow,
Dapple of disease on the skin,
The morse code of rail tracks and
Looking out the window of the journey
At snow and fallen trees,
At grubby roads the people use.
Everything the people use gets worn thin,
Accumulating here and there the dust and wear of
Mostly letting us down.

Coat hung on an iron bent for the purpose of hanging.
Bending at the waist or the knee,
Bent where the fields hold margins of wild grass,
Brown and bent,
Pressed by deer or the environs of wash and wind and time.
Coming out ok.
Laying down a while longer
As making preparation for a journey.

Inviting the muses for travel time,
The inebriate sprites of air and night,
The poets still prodding the gloom,
The signs and significance of action to be question
If not recommended as doubt and
Skepticism as a way of life,
No way to live
In the shades and alleys,
In the gullies of the outskirts.
Lay your blanket over the tall grass,
A bumpy picnic in the heat.

Blonde bright for shadow,
Ripe for the tip into decay,
Arrivals and departures,
Check in, check up
Check out the spiral of all
Curled up in somnolence of each,
A mass, a momentum, an end.