Four Swans: Poems

These are mature poems, meditative, curious about the world of wild mountains and streams, about death and blessing, about the resonant past that is with us yet. And they are about a kind of stillness that has become rare in modern life, the stillness of a man who actually inhabits his senses.

from Some Guardian Spirit

Freezing fog, visibility maybe a hundred yards.

Frost builds up on the pine needles,

the yellow grass, the leafless cottonwoods

and the sound of hammers, saws,

a compressor kicking on and off

in that other world somewhere across

the pasture. Not a bird or a squirrel or a horse

in sight. A rooster and a lone dog

send their voices out into the fog that seems

to be closing in, growing denser, a cloud

barge drifting down the valley spiriting us away.