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The following poems are from my time at Le Pountet community in Ariege, France, in January 2023.
Snow Above Foix
​
With slow ascent,
Snow thickens, crunches,
Erasing knowings and contexts.
Time, in conjunction, thins,
Insubstantiates——
Drifts vague and gossamer
Down the mountainside.
We hurl our stagnations
To the alpine sky,
Caress the wind's frozen fingers,
Its rippling striations. Then
A sound, from ages past——
Downy knells solemn and coltish;
Clangings unfamiliar
yet belly-known; an
Inscrutable warmth, muted
Clarion sending strange
Beckonings across the white hill.
And there they stand——
Huge-bellied and bronze;
Malibu hair, darkling eyes.
Their clemency is exquisite,
Complete; a wild mercy
That pours from their great heads,
Their soft flanks and shining hooves.
They wander the hillside
Freely, content in their
Benignity. We lose ourselves
In that timeless place, easeful
And silent; and then climb
Further, adrift in serenity.
No moon
You reach
Where you thought you were going
Sky turns, unconcerned
Blank stare from nowhere
Moon left us here——blind——
Our murmured irrelevancies
Gulped by her hidden mouth
Or falling like a fistful of flour
Onto the soil's shifting stygia
None of our meanings belong here——
Mascerated, degraded, blackened
Into layers of peat
Pushing like prehistory through the sand
For Soph
​
Dark fingers——
Spindly,
Softly scraping sky.
Flowers made of
Frost blooming
Orgeously,
Insidious and
Delightful
In the silver room.
I bring you
To mind——
Dark ocean
Opaque and
Turbulent.
You arrive there
Willingly. Smiling,
Even, to be
Amongst such
Black waves——
Welcoming
Troubles of all seas.
I am in awe.
Silver Limbs
​
Swing back and forth,
Pendulum drifting
Nebulously
Through the grey
Lichen-bearded trees,
Held together only
With repeated words.
Valley becomes you
Sonorous, silent.
Sun's low arc, silver,
Glints off your slender
Pale branches, limbs---
A crucible of
Substances both
Tangible and
Intangible, shift
From one to the other---
Moss and meaning.
Sapling sweet and small---
All of this is
Consequential.