Paradise View

Birches

We thought when we first came that birches matter
Their many trunks negating space. At least
That’s how you painted them. Green, black, burnt umber
A mere highlight, an accent released
To the crack that peels the outer sheath
Revealing the pure white that lies beneath

What lies beneath yet looks to be on top
Is what supports a colored leafy show
As a poet reminiscent might acrop
Looking out your kitchen window heel-to-toe
Though negative, so obvious a bole
To take what isn’t there and make it whole

Now that it’s whole the birches can retire
Give way to straighter trees that do not lean
Besides, that pure white sheath has acquired
Tracks of bronze birch borer. Tops lose their green
And gold soon follows. I must cut them down
When you are reading books or gone to town.

A Look Back

A look back to the sugar house and shed
where wood hasn’t been rived for years, relics
rotting the floor, the boiler flaking rust,
its stove pipe split and sooting where soot can
disappear in time, and we remember
our March. Private promises to refine

what clearly drips on gray, familiar. Snow
covering the duff that once knew color
moating maple, paper birch, and poplar
exposes those who aren’t accounted for
in winter. Every moment is crowded
with now, no future, too much awareness

in death. The forest springs animation,
the color of the fall rises to buds.
Perhaps our children will repair the roof,
reinforce the floor where sap is harbored.
And you, the odds of syrup one in fifty,
would have them tap every tree in the woods.

Cemetery Grass

Fresh cut and smelling sweet cemetery grass
could be the kiss as names embrace in stone
where names belong. Together in repose
more or less renown still stone stands ageless.

Our children clipped your name before their teeth
grew. Hard words to modify affection
cheated the chisel. As an afterthought
our dead are buried dead without belief:

the aspen start and then repeat the wind,
wind repeats the dust. To settle touching
our lot endures. Where close remains the best
rooks deep in black insist the wind will find

a salmon colored rose. Green tomatoes
inverted force their winter color. Orbs
like life become a hobby seen in this:
ceremonial hands in lavaboes.

We hear the next man when we overhear
his grief. To prove we have improved the stones /br> are spaced, erect, confident the grass
will make the mark of black earth disappear.

Nimpkish: Alert Bay

In the shadow of a fisherman’s face
where the tall remnants of canning plants loom
and grieve stubbornly along Cormorant Bay
the Nimpkish Bar pretends to offer something:

a place where the luckless can get lucky.
Here's thickness over stratum, cloaked upon
bleak piers where mostly barnacles contend.
Beyond, salt seasoned brick warehouses gape,

sprawl down to public docks. No steamers now.
No lines of brailing purse seiners, trawlers,
or hands. It is for us the half bitten
who bring on flies, who look in ladies’ eyes

knowing very well what it’s all about.
Brown hands meet white, titter to the Oceanside.
Indecent, here dead loiter in fresh sun
bound and determined to take their revenge

shrouded on poles to cast that sneering shadow
somehow if it’s the last they ever do.

An Afterglow

It is really autumn before light changes.
While leaves still aut, with birds
leaving their northern beds, I can see
the difference, utmost,

and I know what's coming. Through obese haunches
cooling in sunrise I
sweat still as chop lathers smartweed
mixed with its late peepers,

just as before. But me, I am not as just.
I have fallen to deadfalls
and begin my hunt through leaves for sheldrake
while the still greens chickaree;

a time to miscarry the world as catch.
On-reaching black-and-tan roll over,
but here before light changes, the day
breaks. Apart earth’s re-leaved.