Four Swans

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.