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The year’s door shuts. The last red berries fall
and leave the rowan branches bare and dark
when in the night the wind begins to lift.
The sea booms white and huge;
a ledge of snow hallows the ben’s bare head. And then
it’s still: stars breathe the blue-black sky like brine.
The only colour left next day is grey
except when sudden sunlight comes to glow
the granite headland out across the sound,
firing the rubbled rock a bonfire orange bright
so all there is to do is stand and watch

Because I could not drive, my mother had to drive me
to the phobia clinic where I went to get over my fear of driving,
when I was twenty.  My mother blazed along at a faster clip
than the speed limit, in love with the road more than where the road led,
a love I would never know.  I daydreamed beside her, wondering
what the world’s history would have been, beginning with the Bible,
if essential characters had been phobic.  If Samson suffered from melissophobia—

for Sophia, on her confirmation

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. —Rainer Maria Rilke

In copious curls, her brown hair
         reaches the small of her back,
                  a tangle she can barely brush

He had been a stranger,
so took in strangers,
today three, and
in the heat of the day.
He interrupts my spinning
wool for his new cloak,
orders me to make a fire,
use my best meal
to make cakes
for heaven’s sake,
tells the servant boy
to slaughter that calf
I’ve had my eye on.
Of course I listened
behind our tent’s flap.
How else do we women
learn anything important?
How peculiar of them
to speak of a son
to such as we are,
such as I am who

This morning, I headed to
the woods as I do each morning
without a single thought of

accomplishing anything in
my mind, and why should I?
My dog, always eager for

a walk, doesn’t ever
imagine some future delight,
but lives headlong into

unknowable possibilities
of joy with a reckless disregard
of order or propriety.

She refuses the press
of anxiety that seems to wait
for us at every crossroads,

holding her head high
to catch what the wind brings,
facing the heart of now

It was a one-man show, that wild man dunking each
man, woman, and child into the river with a blessing,
which by the time it was our turn
was brown with mud
the banks a mess of footprints.

It took hours to reach him.
My father prayed the whole time,
swaying with his angst, and my mother,
responsible for comforting us,
got a bit tense around her mouth.

Because where were we to sleep if night fell?
What were we to eat?
Yet the whole long day, sun high above,
everyone in line was peaceful and calm.

—in memoriam, Jacqueline Cooley, 1944–2018

Pray for me, I asked the trees.
Or did I order them? Or just stand still
while the wind bore its song among the branches
carrying us both forward, backward, forward,
marrying us to morning light.

In the grief-room-tangle of my hands
folded together to confront the day,
I’ve found all things necessary to construct a life,
a few blues notes or a new agon to slip on.

I’ve lied about god all my life
                         —Peter Meinke

But who hasn’t? To make
     even the simplest statement
     risks becoming a fake,

a know-it-all who can’t know
     basic facts, like God’s
     eye color, nor show