Happy Hallow's Eve!

Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness — for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall overshadow thee; be still.

From Spirits of the Dead by Edgar Allan Poe

***

Unbidden

The ghosts swarm.

They speak as one

person. Each

loves you. Each

has left something

undone.

          •

Did the palo verde

blush yellow

all at once?

Today's edges

are so sharp

they might cut

anything that moved.

          •

The way a lost

word

will come back

unbidden.

You're not interested

in it now,

only

in knowing

where it's been.

Rae Armantrout

***

Tree House

Start with a tree,
an old willow with its feet in the water,
and one low branch to let you in
and a higher branch to let you
upstairs,
and a lookout branch to show
how far you've come
(the lake before you,
the woods at your back),

and now you are close
to those who live in these rooms
without walls, without doors:
one nuthatch typing its way up the bark,
two mourning doves calling the sun out of darkness,
three blackbirds folding their wings tipped with sunset,
twelve crows threading the air and stitching
a cape that whirls them away
through the empty sky,

and don't forget the blue heron
stalking the shallows for bluegills,
and don't forget the otter backpaddling past you,
and the turtles perched on the log like shoes
lined up each night in a large family,

and don't forget the owl
who has watched over you
since you were born.

Be the housekeeper of trees,
who have nothing to keep
except silence.

Nancy Willard

Two for Friday!

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
       love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

******************************************

The Surprise

                 St. Augustine

Light shafts down on
the assembled congregation of sails

billows my shirt      sends me to where thin countries
stretch like needles    to a low and distant shore

from which    suddenly     canoes appear

Lola Haskins

Two by Peter Evervine!

Back from the Fields

Until nightfall my son ran in the fields,
looking for God knows what.
Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing.
Something to fill an empty spot.
Maybe a luminous angel
or a country girl with a secret dark.
He came back empty-handed,
or so I thought.

Now I find them:
thistles, goatheads,
the barbed weeds
all those with hooks or horns
the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones
those wearing lantern jaws,
old ones in beards, leapers
in silk leggings, the multiple
pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those
with juices and saps
like the fingers of thieves
nation after nation of grasses
that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds
and grab handholds
in whatever lean place.

It's been a good day.

****************************

Aubade in Autumn

This morning, from under the floorboards

of the room in which I write,

Lawrence the handyman is singing the blues

in a soft falsetto as he works, the words

unclear, though surely one of them is love,

lugging its shadow of sadness into song.

I don’t want to think about sadness;

there’s never a lack of it.

I want to sit quietly for a while

and listen to my father making

a joyful sound unto his mirror

as he shaves—slap of razor

against the strop, the familiar rasp of his voice

singing his favorite hymn, but faint now,

coming from so far back in time:

Oh, come to the church in the wildwood . . .

my father, who had no faith, but loved

how the long, ascending syllable of wild

echoed from the walls in celebration

as the morning opened around him . . .

as now it opens around me, the light shifting

in the leaf-fall of the pear tree and across

the bedraggled back-yard roses

that I have been careless of

but brighten the air, nevertheless.

Who am I, if not one who listens

for words to stir from the silences they keep?

Love is the ground note; we cannot do

without it or the sorrow of its changes.

Come to the wildwood, love,

Oh, to the wiiildwood as the morning deepens,

and from a branch in the cedar tree a small bird

quickens his song into the blue reaches of heaven—

hey sweetie sweetie hey.

Peter Evervine