My ash and walnut trees are dotted with gold
The light takes a step into a garden shed
Late sunflowers burst into blue
Like the eyes of a rustic sun
Reeds gone to seed blur the lakeside
And poplars shimmer in a stream
When leaves all gust as one
There’s a scream on the face of change
With strewn leaves and sticks
Swirling in intricate interweaving lines
October’s hollows are haunted by owls
Like a skeleton answering a telephone
A mossy statue in rain with red roses
Replete with sad beauty and without meaning
Poetry
What Sweet Thoughts were Thine
RIP to my friend John Barlow
We met in creative writing class
He was Blake and Shelley
I was Coleridge and Keats
The vanity of poets in their youth
After class we’d go to the third floor
Of Memorial Hall and share a joint
Then we’d go for coffee or drinks
And discuss poetry all night
I saw him as a man and bird
With ever so copious a song
And profuse strains of art
As we danced with creativity
Mortality and beauty
Living only for those visions
That enrich vision and outlive us all
September
Never so grateful as under sapphire skies
What with apple trucks and golden sunsets
If the gods can cleanse themselves in field fires
Why can’t I
Even though builders drive in their year-nails
There’s a lingering to the changes
A reluctance in the leaves to fall
And in the birds who depart
In the conservation of angular momentum
A slowness to the glowing hours
Almost like a space passes into autumn
Into which we turn a vacant look
Basket of Shadows
What’s in your basket of shadows?
I have fruit from the orchard
And tomatoes from the garden.
Where are you going
With your basket of shadows?
To feed the hungry and heal the sick.
What else do you have
In your basket of shadows?
I have fresh bread and fish
And a multitude of miracles.
Can we look in your basket?
You may look, but to nonbelievers
The basket will appear empty.
They looked, it was empty and full,
It was a basket of shadows.
Enduring the Great Light
Light shines in darkness.
Can darkness overcome light?
Is night the birthplace of dreams
Or the grave of nature?
Let’s hope for the big death,
For all the lamps to burn out,
For the annihilation of ego
And the pure, deep, sunless
Entirety of death’s blessing
In ever-during darkness
Comfort us to forget
What we have here seen and known,
Here crafted and endured.
The nightmare of consciousness
To live through it again.
The Image of Thought
It’s in the blankness,
In the problem life poses,
In the fear and anxiety,
In the downpour, in formlessness,
Ripples upon water,
Buried under snow,
Both near and far,
Upon the plain of being,
Itself an illusion,
Like a mirror image,
A rolling mist,
A vanishing line of geese
And any afterthought.
Grackle Migration
Just experienced a plague of grackles
On their way to Texas and Florida
Countless flying through the woodlot
Landing in trees and on rooftops
The air creaking with grackle-calls
The flight of dozens of black wings
Their shimmering iridescence
The bronzed and purple ones
With the sun in their eyes
Like they’d come from night
To turn the earth in flight
Their energy and abundance
Rousing me to change and delight
August
Something about August guts me
The end of summer the start of school
Change imperceptible tranquil days
The carnivals having come now gone
The light of endless afternoons
Weeds grown wild and sturgeon moons
Enliven creation through night’s duration
In August we open our cellar door
We splash wine across the floor
The harvest begun we couldn’t ask for more
Behind the soldier month the bulwark
The moving immensity of this eternal life
Marshland, 2022
After months of lockdown the marsh
Was swarming with abundance.
The lockdown had unlocked nature.
We were immersed in its fever.
There were more birds and varieties,
More wildflowers and dragonflies,
More water snakes, frogs, turtles
And fish in the shadows of rebirth
Than we’d ever seen at the marsh.
Teeming, brimming, the very air
Seeded with a kind of seething,
As the marsh achieved biogenesis,
Its natural state of aseity, and we,
First to arrive after the pandemic,
With a wild surmise, realize its poiesis.
Transitory Engagements
All week I’ve watched cabbage white butterflies
Engaged in mating,
Tumbling as one through the air,
Touching and not, falling and rising,
Fluttering faster and fanning the air
With sexual stimulation,
Seeking to become one of their own many,
Like the folding of their own wings, at rest.
Salvatore Ala 