Praise the rain; the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk—
Praise the hurt, the house slack
The stand of trees, the dignity—
Praise the dark, the moon cradle
The sky fall, the bear sleep—
Praise the mist, the warrior name
The earth eclipse, the fired leap—
Praise the backwards, upward sky
The baby cry, the spirit food—
Praise canoe, the fish rush
The hole for frog, the upside-down—
Praise the day, the cloud cup
The mind flat, forget it all—

Praise crazy. Praise sad.
Praise the path on which we're led.
Praise the roads on earth and water.
Praise the eater and the eaten.
Praise beginnings; praise the end.
Praise the song and praise the singer.

Praise the rain; it brings more rain.
Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

~ from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems 
(W. W. Norton & Company 2017)

have your eyes ever fallen upon a beast like me
i have the spine of a mulberry tree
the neck of a sunflower
sometimes i am the desert
at times the rain forest
baut always the wild
my belly brims over the waistband of my pants
each strand of hair frizzing out like a lifeline
it took a long time to become
such a sweet rebellion
back then i refused to water my roots
till i realized
if i am the only one
who can be the wilderness
then let me be the wilderness
the tree trunk cannot become the branch
the jungle cannot become the garden
so why should i

~from the sun and her flowers (Simon & Schuster Canada, 2017)

Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you've learned how to ignore.

But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you've worked for these past years,
the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
the moving parts about to come undone,
and twisting in the sheets remember all
the faces you could not bring yourself to love.

How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

~ from 99 Poems (Graywolf Press, 2016)

The night has come,
Pink’s job is done.
She was the dawn, and the pink sun.
But now blue’s time has come.
He’ll be the moon,
He’ll be the sky.
Pink sits and waits for sunrise,
Then she’ll be the sun again,
She’ll be the sky.
But sunrise won’t last long.
When yellow comes
And spreads her color to the sun.
Pink sits and wait.
Pink sits and waits.
  
~ From The Flag of Childhood (Aladdin Paperbacks, 1998)

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

~ from Poems 1960-1967 (New Directions Publishing Corp, 1966)

Morning yawns, the sun stretches, and the train
Pitches the air with smoke, paws the iron earth,
Tracks its big city game along the coast,
Narrows the span between our birth and death.
From dreams, we, dépaysés, fall to coffee,
Orange Free State oranges, new news, fresher dreams,
Prophesying what tomes we now must read,
What names we will need, what gods we will prize.
    All we can prove is the sun and the bay
And the baying hunter that is the train,
All joined in a beautiful loneliness—
Separated from our pure world of wounds,
Our globe of love (sharp nails hammered through palms),
Happening alone, as if it matters.

~ from Whylah Falls (Polestar Book Publishers, 2000)

They dip their wings in the sunset,
They dash against the air
As if to break themselves upon its stillness:
In every movement, too swift to count,
Is a revelry of indecision,
A furtive delight in trees they do not desire
And in grasses that shall not know their weight.

They hover and lean toward the meadow
With little edged cries;
And then,
As if frightened at the earth’s nearness,
They seek the high austerity of evening sky
And swirl into its depth.
 
~ In the public domain

The rain stopped	
you never hear it stop
and then the dripping from the trees and then
how could anyone hear it not falling
not arriving and then
not arriving
other things must be happening that way
unheard all around us
you never hear the dog stop barking
whether you are listening or not
we hear things start up and go on
calling and shrieking and singing
saying hello saying good-bye but not
stopping
is that the way it is
is there no sound of stopping
and no sound to
the sound of stopping
then no sound
without stopping

~ from Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press 2016)

I dream of the old house, 	
dusk on the pines, fireflies glinting
through the low brush, and birds—
I can’t say what kind—calling out,	
the last noise of the day.

it’s late summer in the dream,	
I know by the earth’s heat,	
the banked sunlight diffusing
beneath my feet but faded,
maybe August, frost in the air.

across the dark, the tree line
waits for me, low and steeped
in shadow, a shaded green
by the yard’s end, the footpath
to the river visible but only just.

I think I hear my mother,	
not speaking but somehow a sound
of her in the wind, an echo I
haven’t heard in years but recall
and I’m scared to find her.

I stand at the bottom of the hill,
beneath the house in the yard
and watch for explanations, signs
or omens to arrive, justify dreaming,
but there’s nothing more:

just late summer, my old home,
the land slipping from light,
and my mother, lost to me,
but still singing with the birds,
the last sounds I hear

before waking.

~ from Passage (Kegedonce Press, 2016)

My daughter and I paddle red kayaks
across the lake. Pulling hard,
we slip easily through the water.
Far from either shore, it hits me
that my daughter is a young woman
and suddenly everything is a metaphor
for how short a time we are granted:

the red boats on the blue-black water,
the russet and gold of late summer’s grasses,
the empty sky. We stop and listen to the stillness.
I say, “It’s Sunday, and here we are
in the church of the out of doors,”
then wish I’d kept quiet. That’s the trick in life—
learning to leave well enough alone.

Our boats drift to where the chirring
of grasshoppers reaches us from the rocky hills.
A clap of thunder. I want to say something truer
than I love you. I want my daughter to know that,
through her, I live a life that was closed to me.
I paddle up, lean out, and touch her hand.
I start to speak then stop.

~ from Dilemmas of the Angels (Louisiana State 
University Press, 2017)

The sun leaning south has a slow drawl,	
drawing out the day’s vowels,  
taking longer to say but still saying it.

It’s the end of summer, petals closing up,	
the bones in my wrists the first to feel
the possibility of frost.

What I’ve read and remember pleases me	
but has little use—Solzhenitsyn’s sister
calling cats the only true Christians

or Aldous Huxley, impatient with the coolness	
of Virginia Woolf, her meanness to a friend,
writing in a letter, She’s a jar of ashes.

I wish I’d saved my father’s, sealed some	
in an egg timer and used it as a measure,
following the sun’s slide across the windowsill,

in slow ease into night.  I’m looking more like him,
my face getting thinner, m lips more pinched.
Still, I love the way the sun moves	

around lobelia, anemone, geranium,
words lasting longer on the warmth
and thickness of its tongue.

~ from Whetstone (McClelland and Stewart Ltd, 2005)

I have come to recognize certain genetic traits that have been
handed down to me, patterns of behavior, certain involuntary 
actions.  I can feel them happening, that worried look of my 
mother’s, that almost angry, I-deserve-better-than-this look.
And my father’s cough, the sleeves of his work shirt rolled to
the elbow, a pencil poised motionless above a scrap of paper
lying on the yellow oilcloth that covers the table, next to the
white porcelain salt and pepper shakers with the red metal
tops.  Which means it must be sometime in the 1040’s, the war
still going on.  Neither of them saying a work, as if stunned
there in the dim late night light of the kitchen.  And what am
I doing here?  I should have been in bed hours ago.

~ from Sea Smoke  (Holy Cow! Press 2004)

I watched them
As they neared the lake
They wheeled
In a wide arc
With beating wings
And then
They put their wings to sleep
And glided downward in a drift
Of pure abandonment
Until they touched
The surface of the lake
Composed their wings
And settled
On the rippling water
As though it were a nest.

~ from Living Things (Zoland Books, 2006)

I pick up thistles and burdock, seeds of all sorts, on my pants legs as I walk the fields and ditches. Somewhere, way down the road, some will fall on fertile ground and begin the haphazard garden all over again. I pick up pebbles in my shoe treads and when they fall out they spawn streambeds, glacial eskers, mountain ranges. One day there will be a huge boulder right where your house is now, but it will take awhile.

~ from Sea Smoke, (Holy Cow! Press 2004)

Two years ago, my father
Died. What love we had
Hidden under misery,
Weighed down with years
Of silence.
 
And now,
Maybe the poem can free
Us, maybe the poem can express
The love and let the rest
Slide to the earth as the snow
Does now, freeing the tree
Of its burden. 

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That’s crudely put, but . . .
 
If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music? 

Time to shut up.
Voltaire said the secret
Of being boring
Is to say everything.
 
And yet I held
Back about love
All those years:
Talking about death
Insistently, even
As I was alive;
Talking about loss
As if all was loss,
As if the world
Did not return
Each morning.
As if the beloved
Didn’t long for us.
 
No wonder I go on
So. I go on so
Because of the wonder.

~ from Concerning The Book That Is The Body Of The Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)

Light, so low upon earth, 
   You send a flash to the sun. 
Here is the golden close of love, 
   All my wooing is done. 
O all the woods and the meadows, 
   Woods where we hid from the wet, 
Stiles where we stay’d to be kind, 
   Meadows in which we met! 
Light, so low in the vale 
   You flash and lighten afar:
For this is the golden morning of love, 
   And you are his morning star. 
Flash, I am coming, I come, 
   By meadow and stile and wood:
Oh, lighten into my eyes and my heart, 
   Into my heart and my blood! 
Heart, are you great enough 
   For a love that never tires? 
O heart, are you great enough for love? 
   I have heard of thorns and briers. 
Over the thorns and briers,  
   Over the meadows and stiles, 
Over the world to the end of it 
   Flash of a million miles. 

~ This poem is in the public domain

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

~ Preface to Leaves of Grass, Public Domain.

In the glare of neon times,
Let our eyes not be worn
By surfaces that shine
With hunger made attractive. 
That our thoughts may be true light,
Finding their way into words
Which have the weight of shadow
To hold the layers of truth. 
That we never place our trust
In minds claimed by empty light,
Where one-sided certainties
Are driven by false desire. 
When we look into the heart,
May our eyes have the kindness
And reverence of candlelight.
That the searching of our minds 
Be equal to the oblique
Crevices and corners where
The mystery continues to dwell,
glimmering in fugitive light. 

~from To Bless The Space Between Us (Harmony, 2008)

Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile
at this
brilliant, dew-moistened
summer morning,—
a detached
sleepily indifferent
smile, a
wanderer's smile,—
if I should
buy a shirt
your color and
put on a necktie
sky-blue
where would they carry me?

~ from Al Que Quiere! A Book of Poems 

Light, so low upon earth, 
   You send a flash to the sun. 
Here is the golden close of love, 
   All my wooing is done. 
O all the woods and the meadows, 
   Woods where we hid from the wet, 
Stiles where we stay’d to be kind, 
   Meadows in which we met! 
Light, so low in the vale 
   You flash and lighten afar:
For this is the golden morning of love, 
   And you are his morning star. 
Flash, I am coming, I come, 
   By meadow and stile and wood:
Oh, lighten into my eyes and my heart, 
   Into my heart and my blood! 
Heart, are you great enough 
   For a love that never tires? 
O heart, are you great enough for love? 
   I have heard of thorns and briers. 
Over the thorns and briers,  
   Over the meadows and stiles, 
Over the world to the end of it 
   Flash of a million miles. 

~ This poem is in the public domain