october brook

end of the line

heavenly blue

swampside

early days

damicos sunflowers

fall flowers upstate

d&r canal aquaduct

ruckman road wild grapes

a capella

thing called love only you sweet dreams

mountain high on the roof

closter stone yard

giant puffball

sandy hook - navesink

kortright

suicide king

It's in the cards.

That's where the cycle of 13 moons intersects the 4 seasons.
A living archetype buried beneath everyday familiarity.
Anthony shows me the red suicide king with his drawn sword
stuck in his head, pointing at his heart.
He reads drama in the cards matching
the drama of the contest.
We are first-times spades partners. I soon find
he is a wizard of cards
who enjoys the game commentary
as much as the game -
and he finds I am a competent partner.
It is good
but the card talk spooks me.
The individual fates of the cards as we play
become our fate,
controlled by the luck of the draw,
limited by our ability to maximize their potential.
I much prefer the unplayed deck in its regal calendar
abstraction.
The celestial ordering of 4 by 13 transports me.
The cards are imprinted with the music of the spheres.
The ancestors are there.
Here card sharps and sharp cards have their moment.
Suddenly the game is over.

webster brook

grandview

paines creek - dennis flats

ten thousand years

Delhi, New York, January, 1998

In a cabin, in a chasm
of a mountain brook, its waterfall
hip high on its way to the farm land it goes
to the valley of the river running full below.

Ten thousand years the brook cascades past,
ten thousand drops a second together splash,
rushing, sliding, smoothing the brownstone footprint
of an ancient ocean fossil, scalloping the layers,
splitting slabs at right angles, scouring
an inch a century,
carving the depth of a man or woman and more,
from then to now.

We are visitors.

The brook connects the earth and sky
and swallows us up. There is a taste in the air
that settles like a bubble in the hollow
removed by ten millennia of rain and snow.

We come to fill our ears and spirit like vessels with water:
millions of molecules descending sparkling,
crystal ice, cold, wet, soughing in the dark like the night wind
as they course through our sleep, flowing
like another time, a time calling to us to stop
and smell the mosses, the mushrooms, the mildew, even
in the tissue box, a time to daydream
swept away in the water image depth of source
with surface merge of mirror, bottom rock
and liquid in between.

But who for long can see all three at once?

Here in the fourth dimension, the present whispers as a backside chill:
"Time to put the night log on," and I do and then
the boiling hiss of wet wood and flickering flame vapor speak:
"We have ancestors and posterity met here now."