Dead Morning

Drinking coffee this morning in the rain
will it turn black with bombs
who is making such troublesome thunder, I wonder
will they ever come in and have a cup

Porcelain petals spin down from the
newspaper-grey of branches
into beds where
glass ferns are uncurling, broken

Yesterday I would have been afraid
but I woke here to find my body tingling in death
and the life I knew yesterday spun away by
the clock so that all I have left to do is breakfast

Will Surely Fade

just yesterday
starlike they were splayed
trumpeting the sun's yellow
from proud standing stems of onion green

the daffodils today
shrink toward the soil
in shades of brown already
becoming earth before they touch
its humus layer
just now sinking to darker humidities

in the warmth of coming summer
it can be felt that the sun too
once turned black and moist
cycling for three seasons
and returning at dawn

Hunters Stand at Dawn

We pause
maybe five
minutes and stand
listen as forest morning
            comes alive
                 moves in life
           around us

I see the trees
    dark angled shafts of teeming
    strung between
green vibrations of  canopy
and mountainside carpet
the yawning saplings
  sassafras
      hickory palms
     
      I feel our dark
  shaping from toes
     to torso
       columns of our
    own leaning height
     
Clicking sips past
   wings decend from rost
ticks cling and climb from
the roots we've put down
         leaves push out
      dogwood petals sail
lackadaisical down
     we stand
      trunk and hand
       and head still

how many journeys
   just past around
about and in between us
other fathers and sons
generations passing to
            eons stretching down
               as we stood at dawn
         waiting for a bird to call

waiting for the sun to rise
  for bones to drift to dust
       and the forest to burn
a clean fire
leaving only white ash
         and mountains rolling
    molten