Tuesday Poem: On A Random Afternoon

 

                                                                              Andrew Wyeth

Like The Empty Bucket

We dream of water.

Like the cup set down to dry,

we yearn to be filled.

Long to listen as 

the spigot plays

its musical notes on

the cistern’s surface,

a song that gurgles

and tickles, sure as

the coursing of blood

in our arteries, soon as

we stop listening

to everything else. 

Water linking everything

together: springs and 

creeks, streams and 

rivers, all current-driven 

bodies pushing out 

to the ocean, that briny 

embracing magnitude 

we ache to sit beside, 

wade into, float 

upon, fathom.

Tuesday Poem: originally published by Lake Effect Magazine in 1987

Hermit In Winter

To live without words,

to be muffled thump of axe,

hiss of snowshoe floating over hillsides.

At night the forest air is black ice, so you have to 

be a furnace, fueling, always fueling, warming each 

sub-zero gasp with your mouth and leathery lungs.

To wear wolf near your face,

go deep as an old trout,

growl out bear songs at dusk.

When you let a breath go, it haloes around you, 

gray as the gloom overhead, and when work is done 

there's burrowing into the hut's blood warmth, 

its door flaps: valves thudding shut.

To squat among the drifts, wailing with the wind,

to call your own cadence of days,

choose shadow over light.

At night, winter never 

stops beating,

and you are its heart.