Of Postmodernism


All the abstractions are nonsense — except race and gender and class.
        That’s what the new thinkers tell us. 
        What, however, of horror?

Word comes from a friend that a friend got up to pee in the night,
        tripped on a bathroom rug, 
        crashed through an upstairs window 

and now he’s paralyzed. “Horror,” I said. “It’s a horror.”
        I said so to my old friend.     
        But of course I added, “Words fail me.”

What else? Words are nonsense too, so the smart people tell us.
        (Not in exactly that phrase; 
        they prefer their words less plain.)

I’m still here, still stubborn, still quaint, still hiking these woods in wonder.
        I try to arrange mute prayer 
        with the thud-thud-thud of my feet,

rhythm on rhythm on rhythm. Something there is, I think,
        though I can’t quite put it in words: 
        something there is in the sound

of  a woodpecker late in the summer, of the migrant birds who mass 
        on the trails before me, Septembers, 
        all of them flushing at once,

plumage flashing with sun. They’ve done that all my life.
        Take care out there, says my wife, 
        knowing my predilection,

even at 73, to climb the sheerest escarpment.
        I crave my mild adventures.
        I could wish the prayers less mild.

A man can get up for ease to his bladder and break his neck.
        So who knows what it means: Take Care?
        Whatever does meaning mean?

I’ve got another friend. She sits on the local parole board.
        Last week a child molester 
        finished his sentence, she tells me.

He looked blank, noncommittal, awful. His girlfriend’s daughter is seven. 
        There was nothing my friend could do.
        Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

I think I know what she meant. But the world and the words keep spinning.
        My feet keep thudding and thudding, 
        those same dear restless songbirds

regather and flush and regather. The pine spills are bright with young rain.
        Let’s imagine a counter-story, 
        though story is arbitrary.

Is it all still beautiful? Yes. I pray there’s no end to beauty.

​I Keep Going at 20 Below

It’s too cold for me to stay out long at my age,
So I trek the half-mile road below our shed,
Its earth deep-hidden beneath the white.
Far east, Black Mountain shows up, starkly edged
On a sky full of crystals. My boots on frigid ground
Are cheeping loudly enough that with these bad ears
I can’t right off discern another sound:

Pine siskins by the score. They yammer from every 
Evergreen in sight. I used to plow
On snowshoes through powder, hour on hour.
It shames me to say the notion scares me now. 
Still it’s hard to keep with wistfulness when air
Keeps glittering so, and creatures no bigger than thumbs
Keep at their sustenance, dauntless. Each bird tears 

At bough-tips, feeding and tweeting. I focus on one
That worries the sparkling tip of a spruce-cone, eats,
Then flits to another. 
                            Beyond the bird,
Beyond the emerald tree in which it sat, 
Beyond the outlying mountain– well, what passes
Even beyond bright air? And who’s to sense it?
Not I.  It’s birdsong that prompts such opening phrases.
 
Beyond all this, let time complete my sentence.