Wolves

No one believes me that they were wolves
to the point now
I can't say I believe

myself. But
I turned a bend in the track and there they were,
fifty yards ahead, bounding

through a foot of new snow.
I didn't know if the big one was running at me
because it hadn't seen me yet

or because it had,
so I took another big conspicuous step and
it stopped.

I held its glance,
or it held mine. A wintered brook lay between us
like a difference in dialect, or like a fence

keeping one of us in. Would
that there had been some epiphany,
some benediction.

But it's the heat of the thing I most remember:
as aloof
in the snow as a stone in the fire.

Damariscotta

Like a tide-puddle under the sun
the day grew hot and lifeless,
an aimless shuffling parade of tourists
and a syrup-spill of cars and SUVs
along the streets of Damariscotta.
We had come here, Love, for lunch
because the name had intrigued us,
sounded like a sentence one said in paradise.
A pension-aged woman served us salads
as succulent cold as sin
and filled and refilled our water glasses
as though to eat and drink here was to forget.
And forget we almost did, in a summer
of banquet-serving and bed-making
for the moneyed princes of the east coast,
our evenings passed in easy company
on the staff house porch, our days off spent
climbing the Appalachians' jaded ziggurats.
But like the killing heat that day
as we sat and feasted in Damariscotta
our world lay just outside,
spread everywhere like an unholy king,
and we, Love, having eaten our share
of paradise and sin, turned again
to all we could not forget — a new war
sold to us by our leaders
like a profane fetish;
the demands of a people so feverish
in their pursuit of stuff, as Carlin puts it,
that we can nearly feel the whip
scoring our calves to make us kneel
at the alter of Mammon; and the fatidic flutter
of leaves crisping on every tree,
warning us that no retreat will weather,
that we have each a notch named and waiting
for us in the inexorable machinery of time
which grinds because it must,
as the tide must grind the shores
of Damariscotta, where we first lifted
the cold respite of our love to blistering lips.

Magpies

I am unapologetic
about magpies:

They are beautiful:
They walk and kill and wear their colors:

They recognize each other:
They inhabit this world perfectly:

A hex-bolt of corundum
grown outward from some deep pressure in the rock:

As one
wipes its cheeks on the bark of its tree.

Parsimony

Out over the husk of year
crows stagger

like the still-staggering leaves of some
profounder autumn,

free and unbreaking in a wind
to which they are no burden,

no weight at all.

Watch.

How true,
the parsimony of peace —

so true I can't tell

whether I or the wind speaks it,
as crows

neither break in the wind,
nor break it.