It was first a dark blue rattling
As dark as the deep ocean
Then turning brighter brighter
Creating silhouettes of the forest
--The birth of day stretches
In layered colors of silent waves
Now a sort of white pushing up
Like an angry fist piercing the sky
Breaking the shore finally
An orange layer pink to the south
Saturates the horizon and grunts and moans
The weight of a million years
The gravity of love turning and twisting

I’ve had this memory before.

--The bird wakes from the night
Without thought takes flight
Wings outstretched to the west
Upward and over the mountain goes.

--To a peaceful sunrise August 17th 2012--

Take this thought of noon day sun
I give it to you with a flower
Purple like a July rain
In the evening of dusk
Yet this thought is tiresome
As the flower sags to the left
Your bones ache dry and your eyes
Glint in the rays of a gift of July
For you before July is gone
This year and August rushes in
I wish you take it softly so
And place it in your kitchen window
And as this thought and flower
Wither with the dying season
With the decaying thought of summer
I hope you stop to never think of me

Deep within the mountains a valley of green
In summer city of insects and towers of purple and
Yellow with the bees and butterflies preoccupied
With the joy of scent inspecting each door to find
The sweetness of living as the day descending
Sending rays through the spruce like some sort
Of king reaching for his laborers carelessly finding
His mark fallen short as the sunset frozen in
Lines of color spat white with roaming clouds
Yet the river gurgles even in the night and the song bird
Sings into the darkening hours a deafening cry
Hears a call back from some distant neighbor
“Will we survive the reckless night?”
As the howl of the mountain lion echoes granite
Sends a shiver through the ancient spine like
Some sort of expanding as the rooster calls the day
The lion births the night roaming silent paw
Across the nestled needles cracking
Sticks and pretend you are asleep because
Not even one eye on the ceaseless twinkle of
The stars will break your fear, wandering
Lonely as a deer in the midnight meadow
Head transfixed above the gas of space, the twist
Of galaxy and the silence of the forest leave me
Breathless, I hop from star to star like bees
Buzzing from flower to flower myself opening
The doors of sweetness, that unattainable nectar.
--I fall asleep in the meadow and wake to find the
Sun rising above another day and hear the cry of those
Same song birds “We have survived!” in soft sweet notes.

The door of my home is opened and through it
The summer day is fading on the walls those dusty
Wooden planks soaked in rays for moments and through it
I step forward and into and around the corners as if I were
The sun on the horizon gleaming bursts of rays in those
Sullen corners through the dusty wooden slats.

Take seat and watch the completion of day finite resting thinking
Of a summer day spent among the hills of granite and pine
And all the dreams of day complete and spent jumping creek
And taking rest beneath green aspen or discovering
Caves or basking in the sun on granite spires.

Now exhausted in an enlightened thought
Sitting in my home resting with the sun fading into pale colors
On the walls thinking very carefully as the colors grow paler
A pale blue to grey now like frozen lines of shadows
The strangest colors of summer, dusk summer dusk.

“To which poet would find joy
In writing about joys and for why?
If summer is season it should
Be second thought to fall.”

Look at me! I rise from the reading
Of Robert Frost and write the words
Of the earth like a volcano and beside
My brain the springtime flowers
Growing in the sunlight of thought
--There has to be a river somewhere
Said the mountain but it was gravity
Or even larger that said something
In this dark deep midnight hour.

There’s a dead deer in the corn field
Where the hunter has gutted out
A hole to reach the inside
The womb of death
The void of once was
And a fawn walks aimlessly in the woods.

So let October evaporate into November
So bring the truck around the old fence
And pick up that dead deer
So cut two slits behind the knees
And pull upward, upward, upward on the rope
Toward heaven and shave the skin
For winter gloves and cut the meat
For a bursting belly and now all that
Hangs is a disembodied silhouette
From a hundred year old pine tree
So cut the legs, slit the skin
The muscles and the joints
Take a saw and saw away into the marrow
And let the truth fall to the ground again
Hear its loud thump as the dead dies away
And call out the cats from the cement basement
Let them linger in the pugnacious blood
See the blood congeal on their white fur.

So let the hunter be happy with triumph
See him grin in the fading light of evening
So let the poet withdraw into the nature of death
See how gloomy he looks there in the purple dusk.

Imagine being a hollow tree
On a damp morning in
November in Minnesota along Lake Superior
When lonesome is the
Only thought on your mind
When the clouds do not lift
For days and the wind
Is perilous from the north
And the white and black of your
Rotting trunk is the only disparity
To the orange and brown ground
Where the mushrooms, they even they
Are dead.

That is the way I felt walking up
The gravel path at dusk with two friends
Such a dusky hazy muffled
Moment when the only light was
A blue black that seemed to last
Eternity and our breathe from our
Mouths were drowsy ghosts in the air around us
And the cold hit our ashen cheeks
And stung red the luminous blood
Gathered in our eyes and
I thought of her how I would never
See her green eyes again looking out through
Up on the hill looking out through
The forest and over the lake which
Could not be seen as a lake anymore
Just a profound purple translucent hole
And out over into that last bit of day
That bitter blue black which
Hung so hallow on the horizon
The saddest light endlessly
The saddest light endlessly
“We are almost half way there”
Said ***** and I nearly died right there
Nearly crawled on my knees into the forest
And as I gazed behind me into that black emptiness
I saw something run across the path into the forest
Something run away from the fear of loss
From the feeling of hurt and pain
It might have been a deer or a wolf
It never looked back it never turned around
And then it disappeared into the woods forever
And the only thing I could do was turn my shoulder
The only thing I could do was continue on.