Mount Tom and the Moon


I can't help myself.
I just have to watch that moon
in all its permutations.
Even when cloud veils obscure it,
settle on my peak sometimes,
there's always wind
to blow the night sky clear.
 
I don't mind snow.
I even dress in it.
Or rain.
I love to watch
it cascade down my face.
And daylight's taunts are
nothing to me.
I have a way of cooling off
even the most passionate sun.
Air, so weak and vulnerable,
at my heights,
still satisfies my granite lungs,
I don't breathe so much
as have it wear away my ancient outcrops.
 
But it's the moon
that grabs my ongoing attention.
I marvel at its sense of balance,
how it stays up there,
whether full or half
or no more than an orange rind.
Without my firm foundations,
it should fall,
but there it is, night after night,
like a mountaintop
without a mountain.
 
Did I tell you my name is Tom.
As in Sawyer. And in the piper's son.
And the moon is the moon,
no matter the phase.
I'm first to be bathed in its silvery light.
It comes with the altitude.
  

The Nature of the Nature Boy


There I go
asking the permission of the tree again
to flop under its leafy boughs.
Not too heavy on your exposed roots
am I?
Not too hard on the trunk?
 
And then my gratitude starts punching
the juke-box buttons of the air:
cardinal, titmouse, chickadee,
all those warblers I can't tell one from the other,
and tanagers, especially the crimson kind,
and those powdery blue-birds.
 
Wild-flowers are also part of my pact.
I will sprawl a nostril's distance
from their sweetest blooms
but I will not pluck a soul.
And bees can buzz about all they wish.
My face wears its usual sign.
"I am not pollen."
 
Ah, breeze,
sorry if you must blow around me.
And grass, though day seems endless,
I've still not time to watch you grow
 
I express regret to light
as my eye-lids close,
and to consciousness
as I drift off into a sleep
that's courtesy of
but respectful to
my dear subconscious.
 
Eventually though,
it's dusk and I must go home.
The world turns
but not for my sake.
And I'm still prone to apology
so people will have to do.