THE PHANTOM BIRD

A songless fledgling in a ghostly garden,

as if a drawing made with x-ray lines,

emerges out of shadows bound by dreams.

This is the darkened wood in which it hovers, interstices of night between the trees,

whose leaves are feathers so precisely splayed.

And here a woman who remembers this.

Her breath and pauses punctuate these words,

telling many tales of silences.

Her unseen arms are arched above her skull.

She tips her mask-like face to that slow fan, descending overhead -- the shuddering --

a solemn touch of slowly flexing wings.

O wonder, when she sees they are her own.

TREE-LINED WINTER

The frost parched the earth

that remembers rain on a meadow.

Here the cover of virgin white

is everywhere level and smooth,

and time, monotonous, static,

is not sequential at all

but all in the present and now.

A crackling of ice on the door glass

at the local Nature Center

looks like arctic runes or maps

to sacred ice caves, hidden.

Through the large, double-thick panes

the great trees look distorted,

no longer linear, but in fact

each one is bending exactly

as they appear in the clear window.

The winter moon, like one in a poem,

sets diffuse light, not a single

tense line broken on water.

At the crossroads each path is blank.

What is there to see? A birch

and several small pines to the side,

tipped by the wind towards Kokosing.

And if I could see their invisible essence?

I would see a single birch

and pines bent over an icy river.

But the river, crystal with ghostly water,

ceaselessly freezes our sorrows,

waiting to unleash them in Spring.

BEDROCK

I lie down on a rock

that could be carved

into a sarcophagus

exposed to the sun

that lays a blanket of warmth

over it,

one in being with the sun

like fate, like pure being.

Stone is the antidote

to my repeated motions.

It is all inwardness

against the shifting structures

of my surroundings

that oppose a solid solitude,

this incarnation of centeredness.

With no pain, no thought,

no desire, it is free

and tells us how to survive.

But even this surface,

wholly firm, can fracture

as the elements for centuries

fall on it -- .drop by slow drop  --

like sorrow,

but at peace in the end,

unlike the pain that comes

before.

This is the lesson of bedrock.

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IMAGES

The riverbed regards

through watery layers

the parallel embankments

as if they moved.

This cloudy, fluid lens

flows beneath a trestle

over leaves that drowned

with tumbled rocks.

The rapids, from the mill

until you reach this stretch,

prevent a passageway

for heavy boats.

A sign describes how early

settlers found a cache

of native craft of bark

and smashed each one.

 From there until the locks

the river, flat and waveless,

bends and broadens to the Bay,

mixing with the sea.

But here, a quiet pool

lets the water whirl;

and fish, among the reeds,

cast their shadows.

Whiter than the snow

is pure, a heron, silent,

feathers ruffled by

a welcome wind,

eyes itself reflected

on the surface, blurred

and wavy, as we watched

it motionless.

___________________________________

SHANGRI-LA IN A BOOK

The holy mountain

I have never climbed

is measured out on the page

in a travel narrative,

without the singing voices

from pilgrims dizzied

in the thin air.

No consoling revelations

are given in my

unbelief, unwilling to risk

death from altitude

sickness, but for the dead

lighting some incense sticks

beside turning pages.

Pilgrims prostrate

themselves every few paces,

overseen by two sun-burnt

women with a flask of tea.

Their steps, wearing away

the stone path, are not

a cure, only illusion.

Reading makes me

a crazed explorer.

Like the sage, I ascend

clutching my parents' bones

between my shirt and chest --

a signature of transience

as the last of my house.