"hemlocks" poems
Our last connection with the mythic.
My mother remembers the day as a girl
she jumped across a little spruce
that now overtops the sandstone house
where still she lives; her face delights
at the thought of her years translated
into wood so tall, into so mighty
a peer of the birds and the wind.
Too, the old farmer still stout of step
treads through the orchard he has outlasted
but for some hollow-trunked much-lopped
apples and Bartlett pears. The dogwood
planted to mark my birth flowers each April,
a soundless explosion. We tell its story
time after time: the drizzling day,
the fragile sapling that had to be staked.
At the back of our acre here, my wife and I,
freshly moved in, freshly together,
transplanted two hemlocks that guarded our door
gloomily, green gnomes a meter high.
One died, gray as sagebrush next spring.
The other lives on and some day will dominate
this view no longer mine, its great
lazy feathery hemlock limbs down-drooping,
its tent-shaped caverns resinous and deep.
Then may I return, an old man, a trespasser,
and remember and marvel to see
our small deed, that hurried day,
so amplified, like a story through layers of air
told over and over, spreading.
9.5k
At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry--the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
8.8k
291
How the old Mountains drip with Sunset
How the Hemlocks burn—
How the Dun Brake is draped in Cinder
By the Wizard Sun—
How the old Steeples hand the Scarlet
Till the Ball is full—
Have I the lip of the Flamingo
That I dare to tell?
Then, how the Fire ebbs like Billows—
Touching all the Grass
With a departing—Sapphire—feature—
As a Duchess passed—
How a small Dusk crawls on the Village
Till the Houses blot
And the odd Flambeau, no men carry
Glimmer on the Street—
How it is Night—in Nest and Kennel—
And where was the Wood—
Just a Dome of Abyss is Bowing
Into Solitude—
These are the Visions flitted *****
Titian—never told—
Domenichino dropped his pencil—
Paralyzed, with Gold—
4.4k
475
Doom is the House without the Door—
’Tis entered from the Sun—
And then the Ladder’s thrown away,
Because Escape—is done—
’Tis varied by the Dream
Of what they do outside—
Where Squirrels play—and Berries die—
And Hemlocks—bow—to God—
2.5k
Sunshine
Bicycle
Wind
Country air
Miles and miles
Of farm fields
And plush green forests
Rolling hills capped in hemlocks
Wheat and oats dancing in the breeze
Flying among the Heavens, communing with
Nature!
Jun 2, 2013
Jun 2, 2013 at 1:34 PM UTC
Moby **** geometry, physics.
Study every subject everyday.
Homework is an indicator of future success.
Success is not necessarily happiness but it helps.
Freedom is to formulate your own definition of success.
Happiness is an imaginary tree, its own reward, and a fact.
Facts and fiction may be memorialized in memos or found in dreams.
The story starts thus: Each summer the honeysuckles and the
huckleberries . . .
The web is that extra brain we've all been dreaming of having.
Like jumping 4 meters or flying without a plane.
To fly like that must one first have homework?
Some say yes, some say don't. It depends on how you vote.
Happiness is what happens when everything that happens
Fits the time perfectly and it's all out of your hands.
Not exactly. You don't let go of the steering wheel while driving fast in
the passing lane.
You look left and right and check your blind spots.
Homework is an introduction to everything you're not
And all you do not know. It's supposed to help you learn to know where
you want to go before going where you have to go.
Otherwise you end up on Ulzana's raid
Bleeding, without a bandaid.
All the achievement in the world won't relieve your loneliness
Or satisfy your ****** longing. What girls are like behind their eyes.
Survival, procreation. That's all there is to love.
But the loved one is the one who can be trusted with your life.
Whether Christ or your wife. The Muslim moms.
On my walk in the woods I come to a sitting spot
Above a small gorge cut by a stream through hemlocks.
Here someone has left a statuette of the Buddha and the flags you see
Flapping in the wind at sky funerals.
This is a pretty good place to sit quietly and think about homework.
Sep 9, 2017
Sep 9, 2017 at 7:14 AM UTC
Places I love come back to me like music,
Hush me and heal me when I am very tired;
I see the oak woods at Saxton’s flaming
In a flare of crimson by the frost newly fired;
And I am thirsty for the spring in the valley
As for a kiss ungiven and long desired.
I know a bright world of snowy hills at Boonton,
A blue and white dazzling light on everything one sees,
The ice-covered branches of the hemlocks sparkle
Bending low and tinkling in the sharp thin breeze,
And iridescent crystals fall and crackle on the snow-crust
With the winter sun drawing cold blue shadows from the trees.
Violet now, in veil on veil of evening
The hills across from Cromwell grow dreamy and far;
A wood-thrush is singing soft as a viol
In the heart of the hollow where the dark pools are;
The primrose has opened her pale yellow flowers
And heaven is lighting star after star.
Places I love come back to me like music —
Mid-ocean, midnight, the waves buzz drowsily;
In the ship’s deep churning the eerie phosphorescence
Is like the souls of people who were drowned at sea,
And I can hear a man’s voice, speaking, hushed, insistent,
At midnight, in mid-ocean, hour on hour to me.
1.3k
It’s been raining for 22 days straight and I
couldn’t tell you why the evergreens weep like
they do but if you must, the skies ravens are
bellowing what they’ve witnessed in a song we
will never understand and will endlessly hear.
Feathered armor protects the branches that starkly
plead for handfuls of the sponge-clouds above.
Why don’t we listen to the warning calls
of the floods coming from God’s eyes?
The sticky moss resting on the north side of the
rusty hemlocks will tell you, the record is 55 days
since they’ve seen the sun---a dialect less penetrating
than the all-too-inviting cries that echo the woodlands.
Whispers of the breeze flowing through the trees
are not enough to overcome this tempest that is steeping
slowly and surely the habit of nature will wash its face
clean of any inadequacies. Now, if you told me
it rained here over half the year, I’d believe you.
Not just because it’s the Pacific Northwest, but because
I’ve witnessed the consistency of the pure quietude, of the
circling crows that count every beat and divide every lap.
Their dependable vantage forecasts any storm.
Feb 17, 2018
Feb 17, 2018 at 10:14 PM UTC
We may not deserve it
but we were given sight and blood
and soft organs that we know to protect
We may not grasp it
but we were given faith and song
and the urge to dance because we tremble
We could not measure it
but we were given miles for our feet
and a horizon orienting us headlong
So on this night of
hemlocks alive with cicada
moons engulfed in hot orange
hands seeking each other
and bite marks
and hip bones
breath
stubble
and time escaping in astronomical units
Who are we to ask its meaning
with the very words we could
never fully know?
Jul 20, 2010
Jul 20, 2010 at 8:51 PM UTC
Was I ten?
I think?
Was it December?
that I became distracted
by the snow's
falling
silence?
The Dingle's hills lure me
off
the curving path
toward home--
I surely know
my way--
though
path invisible
snow beyond my knees
Now
but for the patterns of the trees
that etch the skyline
I would be lost...
My love....
...were it not for those
I would be lost
My feet lift depths
Impassible
The snow
impossible--
could it be this deep?
could take this much?
should trudge so far?
beyond
my depth
my breath
a fog-- of
all
I own?
I am wading in the white
down-warmth
Sweat
in spite--
of freezing
of parental threat...
Wind brings tears
to reddened cheeks
Toes, long since numb
...and I am late-- as always
Wipe my nose on sleeve
Pull mittens with my teeth
fumbling
tissues damp in pocket deep
I have gone so far
too far
into the Dingle's windings
with my mind
and night is falling
Night is watching
from the hemlocks
now behind
my purpose--
only
in
the gray of sky
the ghostly silence
of the moon rise
I don't know where night came from
How it got here
why I came
only that I want to linger--
longer
than that twinge of fear
Listen...to
soft tick
of snow
against itself
Wind in white pines
saddest of living things
begs a loan of winter winds
Dec 2, 2018
Dec 2, 2018 at 6:01 PM UTC
While we walk under sheets of rain
No words hanging between us
Do not think this is serene
Every drip hit and crack detritus
While we walk under shades of hemlocks
Capsized in escaping rays
Never step on droughts
They don't belong in the phrase
While we say this gonna last
But do not even try
Never let tears fall onto grass
You know why we don't take up fights
While we're stuck in blank
I promised you won't slip
And I went down in a bang
Just before a deer could leap
Nov 14, 2014
Nov 14, 2014 at 3:34 AM UTC
I don't belong here.
This place is not my home.
The uniformity of suburbia makes me wearisome.
I am a pygmy among giants,
Something entirely
d i f f e r e n t
within a
society of similarity.
I don't belong here.
This place is not my home.
I close my eyes and dream
Of a half days drive north of where I stand.
Where Hemlocks tower and
Fir brush the sky
I close my eyes and I can feel
The warm sunshine beating down
enveloping my body made of stardust
The whisper of breeze cast off the lake
brushes my face and tangles my hair.
I belong here.
This place is my home.
The scent of earth and gasoline invites me in,
And I can feel the tug of cut-off shorts and eyelet lace
Tan skin smudged with oil and dirt,
Feelings of security wash over me
crisp and refreshing,
the zealous waters of the lake.
I belong here.
This place is my home.
Fireflies dance and twirl in the iridescent twilight
As millions of stars began to glow softly
I was one of them long ago.
The man on the moon demurely shows his face,
And I smile back.
I belong here.
This place is my home.
A car horn jolts me out of my reverie; smog fills my lungs yet again.
No longer standing among friends in mountain air,
But sitting along, surrounded by concrete.
I needed only a fleeting moment of nostalgia to remind me.
That I don't belong here.
This place is not home.
Jun 14, 2013
Jun 14, 2013 at 10:50 PM UTC
*The biochemical snow emanates bopping dejected the extended, short existences of winter,
Twisting and wandering in knee deep whiteouts that scream and moan,
The chemical spirit, at first light mildly falling in inverse star-shaped fragments,
Beseeches virtue before the wheezing shovels, the scraping ploughs,
The ghosts departed back to air in a crystal tune,
A triad stinging from the bare breach in grade school melodic period.
From the willowy walkway down the timbered trajectory,
Snowflake burdened branches combinate into a rhyme with the masked sun,
The raw, stripped light in overdue the hemlocks,
Stillness shattered only by the cracking cold.
The rivulet is icy over, yet liquid runs,
Underneath, under, deep in its veiled preserve,
Life, the anonymous shadow,
Scuttle’s from stone to stone,
Mingling up a smidgen of gravel from its silent inactivity.*
Feb 23, 2017
Feb 23, 2017 at 3:52 PM UTC
“This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe….?”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline
Among
the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
We stay in a log cabin built by men displaced by the Great Depression;
Who would have said that it was not great at all.
Losing their pride, then earning it back again.
Here we stay,
Provided a place by those men of the New Deal
Those builders who poured out their labor, their time,
Their thoughts, their words among themselves;
And they, I think, must stay here, too.
Mar 9, 2017
Mar 9, 2017 at 10:21 PM UTC
Ringed by a tall, told wood,
A meadow pond dearly stood,
Deep and dark, the branched lands
Of childhood reaching to forever,
Throughout the growing seasons,
Rich in pines, bane ivy, hemlocks,
Naked columns of the freed bark,
To shelter the treed imaginations
Of running youth, where creatures
Became fabled to the wide open
Eyes tearing into the overgrowths,
Heading by the shudders of caul,
In the shades of the woody owl,
Greatly horned was the sly song,
The never present wails of cold, lost
Nightingale nor snout of woodcock,
Camouflaged in the browned leaves,
The gracing sun smoked in the morn,
And flamed forgotten in leafy eves,
In the needled myths of the roaming
Creatures, the dandy pheasant struts,
The brawned hind in the foraging doe,
Painted turtles, helmeted above ripples
Of parapet stone in soft water breached,
Sparking stars reigned with swirling fireflies
And glow of moon, as ever appeared, shook
The playful fear within, without, belongings
Of the child who spun his own tales, so held,
This, then was begun paradise in a sleepy waterlog
Of vale, outward from the shadowlands of creep age,
Kept, for daze, won, dreamed, in the torrid torching
Stalks, sunlit hold, the flash of painted face, knotty
Brilliance set free, the unmatched strike in reeds.
Mar 25, 2015
Mar 25, 2015 at 6:14 PM UTC
Ringed by a tall, told wood,
A meadow pond dearly stood,
Deep and dark, the branched lands
Of childhood reaching to forever,
Throughout the growing seasons,
Rich in pines, bane ivy, hemlocks,
Naked columns of the freed bark,
To shelter the treed imaginations
Of running youth, where creatures
Became fabled to the wide open
Eyes tearing into the overgrowths,
Heading by the shudders of caul,
In the shades of the woody owl,
Greatly horned was the sly song,
The never present wails of cold, lost
Nightingale nor snout of woodcock,
Camouflaged in the browned leaves,
The gracing sun smoked in the morn,
And flamed forgotten in leafy eves,
In the needled myths of the roaming
Creatures, the dandy pheasant struts,
The brawned hind in the foraging doe,
Painted turtles, helmeted above ripples
Of parapet stone in soft water breached,
Sparking stars reigned with swirling fireflies
And glow of moon, as ever appeared, shook
The playful fear within, without, belongings
Of the child who spun his own tales, so held,
This, then was begun paradise in a sleepy waterlog
Of vale, outward from the shadowlands of creep age,
Kept, for daze, won, dreamed, in the torrid torching
Stalks, sunlit hold, the flash of painted face, knotty
Brilliance set free, the unmatched strike in reeds.
Sep 17, 2015
Sep 17, 2015 at 3:35 PM UTC
.
Ringed by a tall, told wood,
A meadow pond dearly stood,
Deep and dark, the branched lands
Of childhood reaching to forever,
Throughout the growing seasons,
Rich in pines, bane ivy, hemlocks,
Naked columns of the freed bark,
To shelter the treed imaginations
Of running youth, where creatures
Became fabled to the wide open
Eyes tearing into the overgrowths,
Heading by the shudders of caul,
In the shades of the woody owl,
Greatly horned was the sly song,
The never present wails of cold, lost
Nightingale nor snout of woodcock,
Camouflaged in the browned leaves,
The gracing sun smoked in the morn,
And flamed forgotten in leafy eves,
In the needled myths of the roaming
Creatures, the dandy pheasant struts,
The brawned hind in the foraging doe,
Painted turtles, helmeted above ripples
Of parapet stone in soft water breached,
Sparking stars reigned with swirling fireflies
And glow of moon, as ever appeared, shook
The playful fear within, without, belongings
Of the child who spun his own tales, so held,
This, then was begun paradise in a sleepy waterlog
Of vale, outward from the shadowlands of creep age,
Kept, for daze, won, dreamed, in the torrid torching
Stalks, sunlit hold, the flash of painted face, knotty
Brilliance set free, the unmatched strike in reeds.
Dec 6, 2016
Dec 6, 2016 at 6:30 PM UTC
Shadows dance upon the hemlocks
as falling sunlight kisses conifer-tops,
the warblers fight the settling breezes,
echoing the symphony of cicadas
whispering good night
to all the other beautiful trees
& wood spirits swimming
in the cool gurgling-creek.
Thank you Lord.
Jul 7, 2014
Jul 7, 2014 at 5:35 PM UTC
Kurt Carman May 1985
A Rise on Neversink
NOTE: It's important for the reader to know that Theodore Gordon was an American writer who fished the Catskill region of New York State in the late 19th century through the early 20th century. Though he never published a book, Gordon is often called the "father of the American school of dry fly fishing. The poem " A Rise on Neversink" is about a boy and his Grandfather fishing on this famous river called Neversink. The spirit of Gordon, who now lives through nature, encourages and speaks to the boy through wind and water.
A RISE ON NEVERSINK
We head upstream past fallen Hemlocks,
Crawling recumbent through advancing grass.
Wetness prevails from the night before,
And seeing us, the Groundhog shakes his head in disbelief.
Sun perched on Doubletop Mountain,
Shown the rising Brown sip his prey.
I wait, another rise boils the riffle.
My eyes question when, Grandpa gives the nod.
The shooting line breaks the winds path,
Invisible leader curls resisting gravity.
The Skater finds its mark, spinning without authority,
Setting a course through the waters force.
Emerald moss, dripping wet jewels,
Deepens the blue-green pool,
Theodore Gordon's reflection shown now,
He smiles, the breeze whispers "tight lines".
Scrambling from my knees I find
the Brown makes his approach, only to show his back.
My heart pounds and only my gut tightens.
Disappointment whelms over, an encouraging nudge prods from behind.
Gordon's voice once again calls,
Performed by the spruce needles murmur,
Patience s s s s s s
My hands begin to steady, premise clear.
Double hauling as if my life depended.
As beautiful an object of lavish nature produces,
From underneath the Brown assaults, Skater devoured, groping,
Grasped with bent snout, outmaneuvering his prey.
Tippet strained, reel whining fervent praise,
Moving for swift water, he surfaces briefly
Seeking the currents leverage.
He educates his pupil with the magical ploy.
A broken fly rod hangs down in contempt, against the tender Payne rod.
The evening hatch finds sanctuary,
And only the Catskills angling legend lingers in the air.
This lesson complete, the boy dreams.
And Theodore awaits the mourning encore.
Jun 22, 2020
Jun 22, 2020 at 12:18 PM UTC