Poet Coronavirus Spring at Hammonasset Beach

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First day of spring, my wife and I walk the beach under a milky, pearlescent sky, the sea quiescent, chalky like the inside of an oyster shell. In the distance, water fades to air at a ghostly horizon. Strangely, we find comfort in spicy salt and rancid fish scents, wheeling gulls calling shrilly, waves lapping at sand that gives way underfoot. Walkers of all ages and complexions pass us, but repel like common-pole magnets in these Coronavirus days.

As if there’s nothing to fear, children build castles for tides to devour, a couple toss a football, and two teen girls dance wildly to music only they hear. Bearded, wearing a ballcap, holding a wooden staff, a man stops and smiles. “Nice day for the world to end,” he chuckles slyly. “I won’t repent.”

I’ve imagined ice, fire and thunder, yet the last day in billions of years, when the sun’s corona flares-out, may be quiet like today.

Just as when the twin towers fell in flames and dust, Mary and I find solace by the sea which birthed all life. In centrifugal times we’re drawn to water, perhaps searching for a second chance.

Skim Milk Sky

Historic Wildfires Rage in Western States

—The New York Times, 9/10/20

Beneath hazy skies tinged skim-milk-blue,

I feel pressure, a weight where New England’s endless azure

September should lighten my steps.

Weirdly visible, air is soot-smudged from blazes devouring California’s homes and hillsides, the sun’s eye clouded by a smoky cataract.

A slight acrid scent brings me back to days cutting line with a Pulaski, spritzing hotspots from a backpack tank, old stumps burning like braziers, snags falling and splintering, foliage crackling like foil in long hours of sweat, heat, and adrenalinrushed heartbeats. Having witnessed the savage hunger of flames, I envision charred wreckage and broken lives in these soft flannel skies, the sooty air filled with heaven’s portion of forests reduced to ragged shadows. Time’s gradual click plays tricks on human minds, and slow-paced climate change seems a future exceeding our grasp. I live in a digital age that scoffs at ancients who augured by meteor and eclipse, but merely looking upward into a cloudless monotony of gray, I know we connect to California with every breath.

Sleeping Giant

a traprock ridge near home

You were invisible as I watched my step on tricky traprock, climbing along narrow ravines thick with oak and beech, breathing hard as I reached the ridge. Dazzled by valley, city, and water views from your cliff-edge chin and high hip, the notion of chest, arms and legs seemed an extravagance, a figment of metaphor. Turkey vultures circled on thermals searching for delicious death, but their graceful flight was all I knew.

Driving north from New Haven one afternoon,

I saw you, three miles from head to foot, lying on your back and fast asleep, the clear outline of your body exposing my Lilliputian myopia, the failed reality of our relationship when the trails brought me close among the hemlocks and hardwoods, and along the jagged windswept ledges where I imagined I knew you.

I now walk quietly, knowing that the spirit

Kiehtan drowsed you into deep, stony sleep for rowdy behavior moving rivers, causing floods, and gorging yourself on the people’s oysters.

In this moment of soft spring air it’s as believable as the violent upwelling of molten earth two hundred million years ago and the tedious eons of cooling and erosion.

You’ve shown me there is more than one way of looking, that one size never fits all. A century ago, quarrymen exploded your head, crushed stone and carted it away to build the roads which bring me easily into your colossal presence. My heart knows they stopped for fear blasting would awaken you in anger to uproot trees and rip up soil, again altering the course of waters with the whole country trembling at your laborious rise.

Slowly I climb the muscular, angular, slope of your slumbering body. I feel your pine scented breath as I breathe. Your human shape has kept these woods, left you protector of pileated woodpeckers, salamanders, wood frogs, Christmas fern, foxes, deer, and flowers from bloodroot in March to September’s asters.

Rest well, snooze away as awe and wonder awaken a hiker’s ordinary days and keep you alive in a landscape created in our own image.

Séance for Dad

For years I lit a candle in your memory, but it seemed a cold, reflexive gesture, the light weak and flickering, just another vigil before darkness returned. Like a sacred offering, today I laid out a pack of Camels, a can of Rheingold— the dry beer—and a Coney Island hot dog and fries from Nathan’s Famous.

It seemed so right, but your spirit never arrived to greet me. So I ate your meal, toasted your life, and lit up, your signature incense ascending to heaven.

The Heart Grows

for Mary

My heart has chambers hidden from doctors, passages mysterious to science. Only you know the way.

You have grown my heart by sharing the heart-sore and heartfelt, traveling from heartbroken to heartsease. Fragile as a spring nestling, durable as stone, only your passion sets my yearning free.

Stronger as metaphor than muscle, this inspirited heart will survive for you beyond the last beat.

Paintbrush and Rifle

Lowering binoculars, I look down at my Audubon field guide and confirm the sighting—a golden-crowned kinglet high in a shaggy Norway spruce.

Gazing again through the lenses,

I imagine John James Audubon peering along the site of his Long Tom rifle.

Silencing birds with bullets, he made them immortal in luminous brushstrokes, posing them so lifelike with wires they seem to dance, colors so vivid the images sing loudly in whistles, trills, liquid warbles, and harsh corvid cries.

Brand name for protecting birds, mammals, reptiles and fish, swamps, grasslands and mountainsides, he taught us to see a wonderstruck utility in beauty and forget the bloodstained paints, the killing that saved, enabling us to repent in his name.