Journal Entry for an Autumn Day

Why dost keep telling me not to exclaim,
Thou, old masonry episcopal?
Why dost not note the air is burdensome,
Thou, buzzard gliding through the evening lull?

Why dost the maples bleed in autumn-time
The sun burns thus since night approaches near
When a man crys out for help

Both hymns and tears betimes go in small rooms
Where child and cradle quietly sleep
The little mountain springs do bathe

Make prophecy on ruins ancestral
Prophecy of life and not of death
Of pebble-thoughts, the rock to smithers crushed
To lay down someone else's time and find for us its own

In all that, transubstantial power
The breath of woods supports this removal
The tops of trees, under the eye-slide, play as in dreams

A smile opens itself.

Who loves so widely that in the lightning and swords of the earth,
the last little blossom of grass accepts him?
To build from splinters the freedom of the inner-flowing sky!
The ground is solid and the beauty of the ring may encapsulate a finger

Nov 7 1995