To the New Year

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

-W. S. Merwin, 2005

Happy Christmas.

[little tree]

little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower

who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see-------i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetly

i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don't be afraid

look-------the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,

put up your little arms
and i'll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy

then when you're quite dressed
you'll stand in the window for everyone to see
and how they'll stare!
oh but you'll be very proud

and my little sister and i will take hands
and looking up at our beautiful tree
we'll dance and sing
"Noel Noel"

-E. E. Cummings

Meet Jayber.

Five Moose Night

Wonderful, really, the way the full moon
casts an enormous shadow of a seemingly tiny
but in truth enormous moose across the meadow grasses
stroked by wind. Happy, too, the way the wind
in my face does not blow my scent to the moose.
The wonderful moose and the wonderful moose shadow,
the very possibilities of which I have never imagined
but the reasons nevertheless I walk in the woods at night.

His shadow dewlap's a yard long, his antlers vast
spatulate hands holding up the moonlight
and the brightest few barely visible stars.
Wonderful, the abundant chartreuse wolf lichens silvered,
the meadow grasses dimly flashing, the moss-filled
not uncomfortable depression of stone I have seated myself in.
Intermittently dark, the shadows under the trees,
into which the tiny moose, at last, herds the enormous shadow one.

Lonesome, the thirty more minutes I wait, the wind
wandering also away, and half-blind, my walking
into the woods myself, watchful, slow, straining for silence.
Wonderful, the silence and the shadows of the trees,
and wonderful, the light from the kitchen window,
a golden parallelogram illuminating both the bird bath
and the great bull moose lapping with its shadows,
one cast to the left by window light, one to the right by the moon.

-Robert Wrigley, 2014

Porch Pew in Summer

-------for Brian and Wilbur Frink

Never a prayer for some place more than this,
wild turkeys in the field where old years blaze
each December into new, where grandkids
roam the drive now, in charge of cat, daisy,

spontaneous song. Any ten disciples
might take their rest on this long crafted oak
left to weather. Wine all around then, the spell
of day sinking in a gospel of talk.

And on quiet nights, painting or writing done,
the garden weeded, house projects holding
for the time being, two people might lean
to one another on the pew, holding

hands in the spreading dark, these few candles
lighting up the sanctuary, the world.

-Richard Robbins, 2014

Harlan County

Stepping over the stones of my mother,
chicken bones, straw,

the cellar in which the man was found,
that man my grandfather

the day the sharecroppers left town,
their son shot dead —

the thing whiskey’ll do to a man.

The woman who waited under the house at night,
counting ghosts and bobcats through lattice of leaves,

walking bare-boned lanes,
toes buried beneath blackened leaves —

no cause for worry
if you’ve walked every acre, planted every row.

Nothing can get you if you pay it no mind.

I tell you these things
so you’ll not mistake my actions for fear,

not think I do not know what makes a life,
what makes people do the things they do.

I know my fears — I’ve named them,
counted them out one by one

like tarot cards, voodoo dolls:

birth,
death,
poverty,
obscurity,
that you will leave me,
or I will leave you.

-Kate Buckley, 2008