Poems

Sweet lovers,
Sleep on sunny sheets,
Dream distant dreams,
darkness relents,
Welcomes morning light.

Eating miniature doughnuts and drinking coffee
Alone in your kitchen.
On the other side of the wall you
Begin to stir. The glow from
Last night's laughter still surrounds me.

Blonde ales and pilsners
Speak summer to me
Curve Ball graphics
Of Egyptian pyramids
Against the Cascades
Lit by a haloed sun
As a baseball rushes
Into the foreground
Hooray for summer beer

From the damp shelter of our tent,
I wake to insistent calls.
The crows will have their say.

I scramble down to the water's quiet edge.
The fingerlings float by and wait for
River insects to make their daily sacrifice
For the good of the food chain.

Birch tree soldiers hold fast on the opposite shore
Clouds accumulate in the east,
Halted by foothills.

September chill erases the memory of yesterday's hot afternoon.
Eventually, the day will again heat up with activity.
Possibilities exist in present tense:
Could we stay happy here?

Moonlight pours down like white honey,
you (and a legion of poets) say.
Limpid light falls like rain, bathes landscapes in generous silver.
Fatuous lies.
Night vigils have taught me the truth.
Luna, mistress of tides, great protean attractor,
draws the light to herself from her prodigal big sister.

She’s a ghost, you see,
and like a ghost, barren.
Barren creatures are hungry
for the life they cannot conceive,
ever seeking life from others.
Jealous Earth-watcher,
she hungrily stalks our living sphere,
her back to us always,
all glowing eye, winking slyly,
spirals stealthily in,
a panther toward her prey.

Earth nightly sighs satiety,
somnolent in her solar stupor;
saturated, effulgent in gifted luminance.
The afterglow oozes from the land, spills from the grasses,
the trees, everything lately sun-soaked,
and there above is Luna, ready to draw it up,
suck it all skyward in a soft gray-white mist,
a tide light enough, for once, to lift free from her fat sister.
She coaxes the excess,
licks the dribble from Earth’s chin,
steals the leftovers.

I’m no longer fooled: Moonlight is Earthlight (was Sunlight)
streaming away to a jealous scavenger;
near-nightly harvests—some larger, some smaller—
to feed a spark that can never take fire, only light a beacon.
Mother of all lighthouses,
housing light as Midas did gold,
object lesson in greed and fruitless obsession.