Sestina for a Far-Off Farmhouse

At times I arrive to find somebody
has been there, raided it, trashed the place.  Or water
has tricked the roof, creating interior weather.  
Once the front door dropped a pane, waved in winter.
I had to shoo an upstart family of robins
who cursed me all the way to the creek.

One April I took a bath in the creek,
submerged in a pool, current run along my body.
When I emerged my head was as clear as the robin’s.
Someone said, “You know we turned the water
on?”  I thought of trees dressing after winter
when three deer appeared, rejoicing in the weather.

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New Orleans Poems, 2019

I. Cemetery Number One

Cold water, one dollar
Crows calling in the 
    cemetery
Book about    water
      Mud underfoot   Ferns
growing out of the walls
     Cackles, protestations
            Free tours

Vaults, sarcophagi 
      biers      Hide and seek
among gravestones
      Marble, cement
          etched names
   A spigot, dry for years
This land, this district...
 
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Farm March 2017—Outhouse Edition.

I.      Wood for which the flames to lick...

Farmhouse fajitas, nachos, Helm at the helm, old time music, fiddles, a nearly full moon, clean cool air.  Chucking my banana peel toward the brushline, cabbage shards.  My nose is cold and runny.  Hat on, hoody, vest, thermal, two pair sox, crox.  Hot dog on the stove in foil this morning, baked potato on and then in the stove last night.  Splitting wood, getting wood, arranging wood, burning wood.  Excursion to Iberia via Brays Church Road, church there at 42, Mount Gilead, cemetery too.  Pastures, cows, farm dogs just chillin not chasin.  I cut up a fallen ash that wasn't nearly as dead as I thought, somehow still going at a forty-five degree angle and living on and through the v-trunk of another tree, maybe the second hickory species here, without shaggy bark and difficult to split—pignut?  The four horses are still here, two white, one black, one...Appaloosa?  I thought that word and then Helm said that word so it must be so.  A sparse, low fog rolled in.  I spoke of Misty at Chincoteague, we talked about wild horses...


Full account here...

Ampersand, Rotated 90˚ Counterclockwise

     Here I am
          at
    ROCK BOTTOM
            again

                   Death, death, death, and destruction

         Bourbon at 13:00—

     Song helps,

                      a Nobel would do better.

              Hand to forehead,
                                            seated,
                                                      elbows on desk—

         
                      staring, stoned, bereft

    
                           all of the past up to the present
                                      & this is what's left.

WI/MN 2013

"Enough planning, un-planning, re-planning, and planning for a lack of a plan. I am packed, I am ready, I am waiting."

— John Randell Cabot, Lake Superior, 1687

1

Lostant
rain on the pavement
good light, power lines & their
towers.

Toluca, Tonica, Winona
Mammatus clouds, water
drips down, hits my
face when
I open the
window.

A nut bar, worry of heartburn.
I went around the corner only to
have a cigarette.  But then Pat
has one and I wonder why I hid it.

State highway 6, Ottawa/La Salle-Peru
On the Illinois River.  Nice place?

There are a lot of windmills, and
an exit for highway 30 to Sterling,
to Aurora—where I went to school once...


Continue with this travel poem...