Proverbs
“[Silence] is the fence around wisdom.”
Ancient Hebrew Proverb“Does not wisdom call,
And understanding lift up her voice?
On top of the heights beside the way,
Where the paths meet, she takes her stand.”
Proverbs 8:1-2
Yesterday was clear
and warmer than we would expect
this time of year
on the lip of Blue Ridge.
Bull bellowed through the afternoon
and the little dipper
tipped a glimmer from beneath
the gauze of stratus curtain
blowing in.
By morning clouds had settled
and an odd mockingbird came quietly
to sip remnants of rain
from the cement planter
out beside corncrib,
and all four of them—
cloud, bird, stained water, concrete box—
carried the same inference
of gray.
Although I waited all day
for the familiarity of winter
shadows dropping long, falling dark,
before they would finally recede,
nothing moved across the field
except the breeze,
nothing met me on the path
except westerly wind turning in
at dusk.
I know that night will show itself
this way along the high ridge
of Mt. San Angelo:
pillar of cloud will dissolve
into the gray solitude of cattle
sighing and that mysterious wisdom
we came here to know
will slip invisibly inside
silence’s fence.
— first appeared in Nimrod International Journal
Tidewater
“When everything else has gone from my brain—. . .what will be left, I believe,
is typology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.”
Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
Here is northern neck’s
typology at spring’s approach —
spindly forsythia and wild mustard
are first to encroach against the raw
umbers and dull ochres of mud and marsh.
Tributaries flow to estuaries running
to rivers feeding the bay that openly
gives herself up to the larger body,
all fingers of water that move subtly
toward the trigger points, loosen
every strain an outsider brings,
yet somehow have lost touch
over commonwealth’s lowland ennui
and cannot stop the anxious oystermen’s
monotonous declarations that surely
by now, when winter has had its way
and the goats have stripped the forage,
it is futile to make the same climb
up crooked rungs of makeshift ladders
nailed to live oak and yellow pine
and into the deer stands just to wait
through one more vacant morning.
“Better ways to pass the time, ”
I heard one of them say:
“no reason not to let the beagles in
with the fenced foxes” to test them
for right instincts, hope to find
the kind of grit they count on
from the native hounds—
how they lock on the scent,
keep their heads down,
hold their noses to the ground,
stay dead set on the trail
despite every distraction,
just like that fine farmer’s pack
did five April’s ago now
when it missed the vixen, who crossed
from the wood and ran three full circles
through the rutted field,
spiraling toward the center,
where she stood safe in the open
because the whole lot of them
were hell-bent on making
every perfect inbred turn.
— first appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review
Last Dance
Stand here with me at the mountain
meadow’s high edge and watch:
now that the longest days have gone
once more and the monarchs,
which through spring and summer
came to lay or feed on them,
have flown away to winter
in more temperate zones,
these milkweed stalks no longer bend
one by one to the mere dependency
of those fluttering throngs.
Instead they lean in unison
as though bowing in homage
to a beckoning wind, succumb
to the tendril tongue of autumn sun
that coaxes them to open spindle pods
wide enough to free from husky hold
the myriad white-feathered seeds
that they expel like a last breath
across the rustling fields; and these,
their promise and their progeny,
waltz the saffron day away
taken up on highland melodies.
Although we cannot hear them now,
my love, I want us to imagine
how our final dance might be
as light as theirs, how we will float
above the stony ground, following
another secret music, bound to find
its origin hidden within a single note.
— first appeared in Whiskey Island Magazine
Ode for a Crossing Fox
Four days I passed along that spit of land
between the ocean dunes and barriered sound
and saw him lying there. I thought him bound
inland as tides, and yet he faced instead
surely windward toward the coastal side.
Four days I passed. The first, he seemed at rest,
his coat still quick against the marshy grain.
The second day his flesh held tight as dream,
as firm as sleep, his eyes remained yet deep.
The third it was the grackle came, walked wide
about but did not light. Then that night brought
a rain that spanned the brim of the fourth day
and left him changed, his skin as unrestrained
as loose cadences of the wind that played
from sea again across the slender bed
the tender hands of grass had shaped for him.
Four days I passed alone and saw at last
from my remove just how perfect stillness
would prove the ease of time in taking him,
out of sleek posture and his sure intent
would move him out of fractured circumstance
above the place where danger always danced,
would guide us both beyond what finally seemed
the strange ungainliness of his decease,
leading leeward over the fenny plain
of nesting plover, into thick forest’s
cover and west into the hinterland,
boundless beyond the estuarine sound.
–first appeared in Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review