Looks like a box, sounds
like a spring morning, holds with
life’s tiny motions.

Me weeding. The dog
prowling in loose orbit. Both
busy, important. 

Piously, the leeks
arise swan-necked, folded, faces
still kissing the ground.

The morning stillness
punctuated—wood pecker,
chimney cap drumming.  

This spring is too much
for verse. The tight bud cluster—
shallots, full of hope. 

In the farm’s driveway,
a duck stands in a pothole
filled with rain, singing. 

Each weekend
we gather into
one household.

Allow me to move
with such slowness, to open and
close consistently. 

A boisterous wind
trying to steal the radish
seeds from my cupped palm. 

Waking up immersed—
sound of rain’s gentle drumming,
the world flushing green.

Everything asog,
aflutter in this free world
unfrozen open. 

My body, roots, bulbs,
stirring with wild dreams under
over-warm covers. 

-

Under the heated
covers, wild dreams emerging
into dawn’s fresh light.

No longer silent,
the snowy sunrise—birdsong,
too, fills the cold sky. 

Squinting on the porch
the first bee of spring checks me
for early blossoms. 

Yesterday’s soft snow
already melting, framing
busy wooing doves.

They’re back—cast iron
black, singing their water pump 
song, shrieking to life. 

Laying late-winter 
straw in the quiet garden. 
No task completes it.

A pounding March rain,
tremendous after winter’s
dark, whispering nights. 

Broadened with snowmelt,
the pond’s surface holds a sky
filled with flight—ducks, geese.

Kneeling, I begin 
in the asparagus bed—
knees to ground, weeding.

Balmy November
stretches, March squalling with snow—
Spring mirroring Fall. 

Counting live chicks, feet
of broken fence, garlic tips,
risky days of frost. 

A lifetime marked by
entertainment eras in
varied plastic shapes.

Two centuries on
I mourn them—those smoking ghosts
of Borodino.

It isn’t lonely
the great world outside, beyond
pixels, rewilding. 

Cleaning shelves, sorting
socks—so many small actions
coalesce as home. 

How wonderful! True
play—writing and doodling
letters to the kids. 

Wrenches hung on nails,
work tables, tool chests, a cat
perched on an old chair.

The ground, splotched as a
cow’s broad side—the dog spraying 
slush and mud in joy. 

Among the beefy,
reddish Holsteins, a white cow
of dual purpose.

The farmer’s great-great
-grandfather, on this farm, kept
a herd—meat and milk.

He tells me, nourished
that morning by dairy—milk
cannot make money.

I write, and make metaphors about the great evanescing stream of moments, so quickly fading into a downstream mist, that makes up a life. I admire the old haiku masters, who were particularly good at this, with all their talk of leaves on water, cherry petals falling, and evaporating dew. What, though, am I to make of, or write of those wet rocks worn smooth by their very immovability, immersed in all this, or the debris that lingers, clinging to them, or the creatures which occasionally leap or crawl out onto the banks and speak in singular voices?

As yesterday evening, passing through an average weeknight—making beef and barley soup, exchanging the sounds and words of a long relationship with my husband the while, then saying, ”I’m going out to do the chickens,” in that unremarkable, remembrance-free way I have said it hundreds of times before, except this time the moment doesn’t burst in its usual soap-bubble habit into nothingness. It emerges, crystalized, as my heel slips on the porch’s top icy step, which in another fleeting, barely-noticed moment of cognition, my mind had deemed safe. Deceptive, the bricks—clear despite a day-long mist of nearly vaporous snow, melted as intended by the salt scattered that morning by my husband, and just refrozen into a nearly invisible varnish of smooth ice. 

It is over before I even realize it has begun. Flat on my butt, on which I landed, I sit listening to my immediate recall memory playing over and over the “oh,” that came out of me at the moment of impact—quieter than I would have expected, an exhale carrying with it a simple, sorrowful note. 

It is something like a snow globe, this strange object now in my possession. Morning, the next day, I sit smarting, waiting for the doctor to diagnose the deep and profoundly present pain in my hip, and I shake up this moment again and again, watching the features of this little miniature fill in—the dusky yard bright with snow, the Christmas lights threaded through the porch rails glowing beatifically down onto my purple coat, my old crinkly snow pants, my open hands, held by old work gloves, palms down on the slick bricks that have upended me and caught me, both.
With each examination, it grows finer and more detailed.

When I have finished crafting it, I will place it on a shelf beside its fellow curios and relics where things such as this, things which have found their way to exist outside of time and its oblivion, wait in their odd durability, ready to hand, for, say, a ponder or the need of a tale, there in the great cabinet of memory, enduring.

Dune of snow, as sand,
a perfect, white ridge crafted
by the wind’s clear hands.

I open the old
book. Closed, rested these three years, 
now it splays broad leaves
wide and I contemplate the
miraclescape of gardens. 

Sorting and shelving
books, basement miscellany,
balming knuckles, lips,
simmering pot after pot—
the warmth of winter tending. 

At twenty below
the predawn sky fills with blues, light
the color of ice.

Gracious old house,
bringing in the cold with its
accustomed welcome.

Songbirds plucking seeds
scatter when the hawk streaks in
to pluck a songbird.

The minimalist,
winter, takes away our toys,
lights up what remains.

Near the space heater
a field of ice flowers pressed
up against cold glass.

This day’s reminders—
snow is not just beautiful
as screened, but to skin 
is cold, is wet, and beef stock
comes not from plastic, but bones.

Yesterday’s slanting
track of prints or uncut snow’s
stable resistance.

We’ve reached it—the poem
for which the whole collection
was named. The Christmas Day
of poems, on which the sun

rises and does not rise 
the same way, 
which we all sense, just as 
this ink and paper presents

a poem and a Poem.
Here it is, and here,
too, the author, saying—
this is what it’s all about, 

and this poor creature 
of lines and stanzas
becomes useful, penned in, 
never again to be freely encountered

as a bend in a trail through 
a forest might reveal it, 
halted, as you are,
in sudden revelation.

Clumps of clinging flakes
crystal frozen ajumble—
rain, just barely snow. 

Freshly fallen snow—
the great illuminator
of comings, goings.

Hands in warm water
I watch songbirds in constant
motion against cold. 

Every bird wearing
a tiny cloud of warm air
contained by feathers.

Poking just above
snow’s white blanket, an iris
shoot, eager for spring.

-

Shoot frozen above 
the snow’s protection—patience 
learned the hardest way.

The wind streaming its
water metaphor around
and through the drenched house.

-

Again, the wind makes
its loud reminder of our
total immersion.

Melting snow soaks the 
soil—every step, the mud-caked 
boots acquire more mud. 

-

Mud-caked boots
twice as heavy on
our return. 

In warm deep litter
cattle standing, resting—one
white face observes us.

Fields for corn and hay
snow tucked for winter—cattle
enjoy their labors. 

Loading up pallets
of beef—the quiet farmer, all
smalltalk, contentment. 

Winter assists with
defrosting the freezer—meat
frozen on the porch. 

Dark in the basement,
a treasured chest of frozen
jewels, marbled, red.

One of how many?
There, on the doorframe’s top,
a small, dark presence.

Listening, the stream
washes over me—these words,
two hundred years old. 

Remembering I,
glorious and single, was
given words and weeds.

After three injured
years, squatting, lunging, cleaning
the shower with joy.

Dark hours—the prayer
plant steeples many green hands
in nightly vigil.

The human scale
of all this apparatus—
the skin-and-muscle depth
of a syringe’s needle, tip to hub,
the snug core, just wider 
than human hips, human
shoulders (on average) at the center
of every MRI machine, pills
fit to mouth and an easy throat
slide, tubes just narrower than nostrils,
windpipe, foodpipe, and all gauged
for use by human hands, human eyes
and minds. Never had I appreciated
all of this before a sage and gentle 
woman partners me skillfully—
a small step toward, an exhale, a benign
adjustment of my breast 
as if a forearm, a toe, a strand 
of hair—into place, the whole 
front of my body snuggly locked in, 
my arm in dancer’s grace comfort
-ably reaching to the fit, palm
-to-palm, of a rounded rubberized 
handle the perfect human distance 
away and here I am, clasped,
a moving camera arcing, tracing
that invisible golden circle floating
above my (and every) human head, 
taking image after image, the heat 
of my body warming it as I stand 
hugging this machine.

Can you do it every day?
Can you do it with the cool summer dew 
soaking the whole sole
of both your shoes? Can you cut a path
through eight inches of fresh or crusted
or wet or ice-concealing snow? Can you limp it 
when a muscle in overuse
rips its fibers? Can you manage it
as: “she has cancer” or “a month to live,
maybe two” marches through
your steps? What about: “will I
ever recover?” and the thorough
and disinterested silence that always
greets such questions? Can you do it
when the moon is so big 
you must run back to the house
to say: “put down your screen and look!”
Can you go, even when
you don’t really want to? Can you
clean out a mouse trap
once, and then another 
900 times? Can you stoop 
to asking for help
when you need it? Can 
you carry a gallon of water? Can you bear
the sight of one of your birds
whose eggs have sustained you, whose
downy baby fluff once touched your careful 
palm, who you have watched survive winter
after winter, who ran in the purposeful 
and unaffected way of chickens 
to devour strawberry tops with such joy 
and abandon, can you bear her 
lifeless body, uncanny as lifelessness 
is always uncanny, left behind 
where she chose it to be left, often
somewhere safe, hidden, underneath,
a place she would have fled to as a chick, can you bear it
on an average evening, some chore
half done, company’s coming, 
and you in the middle 
of some important chain of thoughts,
and there she will be. Her—
corporeal, present but flown,
released into this great cycle
that you have, if you can choose it,
committed to witness.

Unnecessary
candle, at dusk, this longest
night—I light it still.

Winter Solstice night—
ample dark hours for the mouse
in my bedroom wall.

Another Christmas
cookie kaleidoscope paints
the kitchen counters.

I, too, set with buds—
the magnolia waiting
for spring to blossom.

Confused, we listen
to a bright cartoon sermon,
the sky’s contents, lost.

Every tree bearing
a glass crown—in such beauty,
bowing to the ground.

Driving by the field
my husband sees and shares a
family of crows.

Everywhere the wind
menacing the trees, sweeping,
cleaning old debris.

Moonlight and mattress,
blankets and pillow—chill seeps
in after the fight.

Bright voices
from the bright phone fill
these long nights.

A chandelier drops
and we rise, bubbles and cheer.
Welcome to the year.

It is one, unique,
and a turning, a transformation.
The etymology website tells me this—the same one
my brother used to read like a novel 
back in the good-old days
when this discoverable, adventure-novel world
held a person I could turn to for anything. 
More recently, a professor offered a version I like far better—
it is one, unique,
and a verse, a canticle.
One song—a hymn to be chanted or sung
in praise. Something made with a voice.
The universe—a line of poetry
made of breath and music. 
Perhaps Tolkien, who became
my advisor in adulthood's void, 
liked this version, for a world 
born of song was his sub-creation. 
Now we invoke, appropriately, a new meaning,
stealing in like cowbirds to lay our hopes 
in someone else’s nest. I, too, have
poured out this libation—universe,
in the accepted deception, groping and grasping 
at the cool shrouded roots below 
the blazing branches, an imbuing 
voice, a single, round syllable 
opening and filling—
God.

Stubborn old windows
elaborately crusted—
fresh brushstrokes of ice.

Scrubbing the grubby
desk, dusting keyboard, screen—good
work begets good work.

Afternoon flurries—
cardboard bits, leftover yarn
becoming snowflakes.

-

A lovely snowflake
sewn by mother and daughter
in spring’s pastel hues.

We adorn a tree
with ornaments—outside, ice
glitters on branches.

Family pot pie—
brother’s crust, lard from dad, both
are not here, and yet...

Vacuuming beetles
trapped by the window's opaque
impasse—clarity.

Snow half melts, refreezes,
falls again—wife, husband, dog, 
chickens, all cooped up.

Our order an hour
late, we waste it with little
jokes, a wander, song.

He would not build it
as a cathedral—my mind
erects one, despite.

Sunrise, the sleepy
reader resists line after 
line of verse.

Screen-bound infinite 
ephemeral characters
appear, disappear.

At the first letter
a profound pause—there lingers
creator, reader.

Boxes of cookies—
crossing icy driveways that
connect and divide.

Last snow, tucked against
the north edge of the forest—
fog drifts into dusk.  

-

Blurred by fogging snow
the misty silhouettes of
three fairytale deer.

Unseen in every
home, a jar which pouring out
will never empty.

With eyes a sky-serious
and heavenly blue, he stares
and stares, from the hearth
of mom, he considers
the existence of this
suddenly-present aunt
-shaped being and I share
in the communal 
mesmerization, the swooping 
soul shift—density, texture, 
something like straw into
gold, a simple and wakeful
kiss, a beanstalk exploding 
from the common, ordinary
ground when he, kicking and
grinning in goofy beatitude,
stuffs both small fists with
delight into his mouth.

Tiny field-bound pond
nourishing bullrushes in
a tall ring—three ducks
flee into the sky and I
watch them with apology.

Afternoon sunset
into colors all sombered
to brown, hens roosted
well into morning—it’s here,
the November call to rest.

The TV shouting
football, trucks, drugs, shies me
to blankets, flannel.

Bite of butternut—
expecting creamy sweetness,
finding store-bought tang.

Ingredients and
anticipation—house full
Thanksgiving morning.

Thanksgiving matins—
today, let me say thank you
in the way of hands.

Through bare branches, light
pours into the open yard
illuminating
a broad swathe of snow—inside
I am crammed with lists and tasks.

-

Through bare branches, light
pours in, illuminating
a list crammed with tasks.

Morning full of chores—
outside, the open yard stretches,
a broad swathe of snow.

Scattered silverware,
crusted pans and pots, crumpled
tablecloth and thoughts.

Old Christmas tree farm—
we trudge its snowy stub field
cutting down nothing.

Chilly window pane,
little dog and I wonder—
winter already?

Rising in darkness,
present and awake for all
light given this day.

Grow their ordinary roots
delicate and downy
as new feathers, those
warm, wet and hidden
life threads—bestow
the commonplace
ecstasy—new leaf
uncurling out of the dark,
unremarkable dirt.

Shadowed evening spent
in the TV’s flickering.
Its light shows us

a Revolutionary War
documentary. It is produced
beautifully, compiled

with obvious great care—
hand-drawn maps scrolling
to the rally-beat of breath

-filled fifes, the lament 
of cradled fiddles, shots 
of contemporary re-enactors 

in perfect period kit, each
garment authentic and I marvel
at the recognizability,

even now, even through the drone 
shots of their forest marches, and the 
surety of so many human beings

rigid at computers,
their fingers stroking and grasping 
the static, uniform plastic

required to manifest
these images in my home. 
The boots are leather 

and so plainly hand-wrought
I can sense the awl’s handle,
globed and smooth, in my palm.

The gaiters, held taught
with buttons roughed by tarnish, 
a wool so real and normal, 

my fingers feel 
the felt, I know without seeing 
that the living sheep existed,

a fleece of fibers haloed  
around each of their 
ordinary bodies. Every individual

item worn on every drumming
chest, every weary, lice
-scabbed, frost-bitten limb, every

scrap of canvas and linen,
of leather, wood and wool, 
the origin and make 

known, detectable, even
on those black and frigid
nights, lit only by fire

and the sun’s many 
reflections—the moon, 
the fog, the ice—

the fingers knew 
what they were touching
as do my eyes, despite

so many bafflements—
the screens that channel such offerings,
these bright and artificial nights.

While reading, I encounter
this idea—the language
of God spills out all
around us and through us
and each of us is a singular,

living word. This conception
arrived from a distance 
greater than the human 
difference between two 
distant dialectical structures, 

than four thousand 
gently curving earth
-surface miles, than seven
hundred astronomical years, 
the distance between belief

and confusion. I imagine
myself as a word, the word
of myself, the unreadable 
blur of divine, untranslatable
characters. It is here, 

the tether, transcendent—
the lungcraft, the mouthcraft, 
the worldcraft 
of feathers, once aloft 
in firmament, become vessels

to ink the binding
filaments, invisible 
as the weaver’s own 
creation without this 
dew’s illumination, 

reaching, stretching 
out between—linking
mind to mind.

Another autumn 
freeze catches the water still
hose-bound and waiting.

Perched over molted
drifts—instead of eggs, chickens 
regrowing feathers.

The reduction to
shades of brown—revelation 
of manifold hues.

Grant me the patience
of houseplants, waiting out low 
light, human errors 
in watering, pests, dry air—
controlling nothing, they grow.

Dining light under 
repair—early dark broken
in candlelight’s glow. 

-

Sharing stories by
candlelight, the broken light
forgotten by all.

COVID vaccine just
after the cold—season of
fresh immunity.

It’s still there—the pain, 
the soul that without the pain 
I had forgotten.

Cold snap! The molting
hen shivers, fluffing out a
sharp coat of bare quills. 

-

Shivering in a
jacket of mostly quills, one
late-molting chicken.

With sunrise, the crack
of rifles close by, distant—
November fifteenth.

Slices of deer heart
nourish the hunters—bone tired
after butchering.

Immersed in the good
autumn chores—washing little 
red venison flecks
from the grinder, bowls—choosing
presents for each beloved.

I want to tell you, but it becomes 
too immediately ordinary, those 
simple houses built for mining
families in their clean and kempt 
rows between which I walked, down
the alley, cracked, well-trodden,
and wet with rain, toward the house 
where, for two ill and injured years 
I had not entered or breathed or, simply,
been—and, now, there it was, the yard 
all tilled up, a garden, framed in trees 
the blazoning colors of autumn. I want
you to feel it the way it came to me—
before I ever saw them, their laughter
a joyful thing beyond music, braids
and ponytails and bare feet, the absolute
energy, my nieces, all ebullience,
skipping their way to greet me.

Midday watering
the hanging baskets—surprise!
the wet gray tree frog.

-

Watering, and then—
glistening gray tree frog
on the basket's lip.

Buzzing wasp, unseen,
immanent, close—another
MRI needed.

The pileated
worries the willow’s old holes—
back pain worsening.

After such a long
drought, this whisper of light rain
is inadequate.

-

After a long drought 
a light rain whispers fears,
inadequacies.

Rain casts its lament
everywhere—remembering
how I lied and lied.

Sunset colors, wild
as the lake reflecting them—
oh, Superior.

The toddler, who found
no rest in bed, now, beneath
leaves golden and bronze,
soundly asnooze, lolling in
the carrier on dad’s back.

Excited to craft
paper bag owls, together
the kids hoot, hoot, hoot.

-

Excited to craft
paper bag owls, nieces and
nephew, the whole flock
flapping over, singing out 
a greeting of hoot, hoot, hoot.

She’s already old
enough to lift her baby
brother off the floor.

Sunset at grandpa’s—
backyard bridge, stream flowing, kids
write water letters.

Sinus inferno—
like Dante, I must descend
deep to convalesce.

Through this haze curtain
of head pounding congestion
I recall its source—
in play, in prayer, nieces and
nephews reaching out to touch.

Sporadically, one of the hens
erupts in a series of creaking, cawing, clarion hoots
for no apparent reason

and if I am not alone
in the observance of this oblation
I am often asked—why is this happening?

There is the general assumption that 
something is wrong. An injured hen?
A predator in the coop? I too

once shared this concern. In the early years
I would rush out to the run
only to find a perfectly contented hen

eyeing me sturdily from her clawed up earth. 
We hear this knell and toll right through 
the walls of the house, where I,

in deep penance, recall 
the breaking, cooking, and eating
of the weakest, thinnest

eggs, their yolks so yellow,
so uniformly pale, laid forever 
under roof, no sky, no earth 

to scratch, no tip of beak, no feathers
ever rustled by the breeze, 
no nearby home, no people

living, no children 
daily growing, not a soul listening,
no ready ears to receive it, and so—

no wild music, no reason for singing.