Laboring uphill
unlike Dante
my steps do not lighten
as I go

Pine pollen paints
shoes a dusty green
olive drab slightly yellowed

Alive between Inferno
and Paradise
Purgatory
we may sin no more
but we pay for the sins
behind and below us

Seven cursive P’s
cut into my forehead
peccati
one for each day of
my weak week

We stay in a cabin
on the hill
looking down
on water

Prayers from those
breathing, casting shadows
sporting their Adam or Eve
could shorten my time
uphill

I take a path
trees marked in Passover red
I run my hand along the bark
where fire has chased these trees
and scorched their ankles

Atop the hill
I have been told
is a Lodge
closed for repairs
statework taking its
sweet overtime

I wonder how they can leave it closed
with so many waiting to enter and stay

Life is serious
in such strange ways
immanent and transcendent
betwixt and bewitched and between
inexperience facing
the demands of the day

Uphill laboring
by laborious footfalls

I am callow
unable to focus
in full upon life’s liturgy
its serious play
unwilling to accept it as a gift
so misunderstanding it as a task

Love loves
hopes to love understandingly
but loves misunderstandingly
often
making unhappy both
lover and beloved

I do not have my life
in precise and stringent categories
living in sloppy thinking
wringing the acorn from the lily
chasing the rabbit on an ox
out of season even in season

Can our life be our poesy
can we live metered lives
can we find ourselves Canting
day to day
turning to the left to find
Virgil there, whenever

It is our vacation
the family’s
holiday
but I would dignify my leisure
by taking time to sorrow in knowing
no one has crowned or mitered me Lord of myself
I am impure and too flabby to mount to the stars

I labor uphill
my forehead a child’s penmanship lesson

1
Scribe out of work
At a loss for words
Not his to begin with,
The man life passed by
Stands at the window
Biding his time

2
Time and again
And now once more
I climb these stairs
Unlock this door—
No name where I live
Alone in my lair
With one bone to pick
And no time to spare

Hail O ye seven pupils
Of Aristeides the Rhetorician:
4 walls
& 3 settees

Rest lightly O Earth upon this wretched Nearchos
That the dogs may have no trouble in dragging
him out.

Muddy waters hide creatures beneath.  We know this because
Turtles spy on us from nearby, black heads breaking the surface.

Each of us, book in hand, sits and reads.  We were here last night
When a knot of toads and an army of frogs barked at us, each other.
Bats frantic twilight butterflies.

I think of Modern Love, egoist that I am.  I drink the pale drug of
Silence, a junky.  Forty-one and tongue-tied I have words only
Of quotation.  Thoreau.  Nature exhibits herself to us by turns and
The ice in your pint jar of water falls forward in a clump
Against your lip as you drink.

No one disturbs us here, although I did hear voices—over there,
By the waterfall.  I circle words on the page.  ‘Mystics’, ‘depths’,
‘Under’.  I etch marginalia:  “The holiness of what ought to be?”

Warm in the sun I shut the book.  Walk?  Yes.  We walk in Love’s
Deep Woods.  I would talk, but the weight of my bag, with our books,
And the warmth of the air, shorten my breath.

From where this long silence, this big quiet?  Who set this watch
On my lips?  Will no angel roll back the stone?  What seek the speaking
With the dead?  The tongue no man can tame time has.

We were here last night.  We are here today.  We are walking, now
Past the waterfall and the knee-high longleaf pines.  Trees that have
Evolved fire proof.   The Barn Trace our path and we end among stones
Once a walkway.  The house is gone but the barn stands.  Silence
Is broken by passing cars.  We are out of the woods.