Solidago

The goldenrod blooms in the August heat

Rolling ribbon of flaming floral light;

Monarchs on the milkweed rest wings and feet,

The sloped sun signals summer’s slow-born night

For which the fawn-brown spider’s spinning

Her web betwixt an elm-tree’s knotted limbs,

Beside the highway, on which one’s speeding;

Strange thoughts wax uncanny as daytime dims.

Past the verge squat homes: clapboard, low and plain,

Silvered barns and fence-posts, and rusting trucks—

The cosy and exotic sought in vain

Scanning map and memory without luck.

The screen-door up the gravelled path

Is a lawn and a universe away;

A fear of real or otherworldly wrath

Makes the driver to in their auto stay.

Clumsy boots crunching the road-shoulder’s stone,

Wandering to Somewhere in the gathering gloam;

Headlights snatch a spectre, wispy and lone,

As if a ghost were thumbing her way home.

Something in the Woods

The summer sun drawing low and gold,

Damselfly and bee have buzzed back to home;

Aspens rustling louder than footfalls on the mould

That sheets the fallowed orchard’s loam;

Standing on the verge of farms and forests

Limned by boulder and brightly blooming weeds

Whose rhythmic dance the dying breeze arrests,

Stills the squirrels, starts the blackbirds from the reeds.

What bid them silent fall? Not scent nor sight

Reveal, but to my prickling spine it’s clear

That a formless and a nameless fear

Is furtive lurking in the late-noon light.

. . .

Death on a Flower

High in a sky as faience blue
An orb like molten copper glows
Whose fire long chased the morning dew
Off milkweed, thistle, meadow rose;
Cardinal’s call, cicada’s whine
From berry bush and wild-grape vine
Echoes off pine-crowned roadside hill
Where currants ripe, baskets to fill;
Beyond the wood, the Lake beach reeks
Of hot dogs, beer and firework smoke;
The muskrats toil in sun-warmed creeks,
And dragonfly and Mourning Cloak
Dance and whirl, while the barred owl seeks
Soft repose in his hollowed oak
And tree-worms rest in elm-wood bower
Through blist’ring, buzzing mid-noon hour.
A busy bee – no rest for she –
Alights upon a gilt-plumed reed,
The goldenrod which bounds the lea,
So that her kin might thereof feed;
Spies she not that velvety bead?
Yellow, splashed pink, and tense with need –
The eyes, all eight, which gleam with greed?
No shadowed trap, nor silken snare –
‘Tis Beauty forms a murd’rer’s lair.
Lightning claws pounce from living bloom;
A poisoned bite thus seals her doom
While breeze-gusts in the verge-scrub play
Furtive whispers; a Summer’s day.

. . .