Catching up

Here are the poems for the 17th through the 22. I was traveling.

*
Counting words or counting birds
in the alder trees along
the river. Seventeen crows haunting
the branches

New leaves glow green

against the never-ending gray.
Each crow its own shadow,
each word its own stone
disturbing the silence
 
*
An Armada
martials
a certain rhetorical
madness
off the coast
of Korea
“Mother,
will there be
war?”

None whom I trust.
Listen,

the leaves struggle
to unfold
despite the unseasonable
rhetoric.
New buds swell
on twigs
pushing toward
flower

 *
Wind turbines
rising 
from behind
the low curve
of the hill.
Driving toward
twilight
into the dark.

An “expected death”
illness

Growing old,
it seems,
even if falsely,
that the world
grows old
with you,
the familiar
always fading
away.


 *
Falling 
into silence
those familiar
voices
that mingled
with the television
over couches,
clatter
of kitchen tables.

Cold:
this driving rain.

Gray hairs
and shoulders wet
settling in the pews
remembering
stories
they have told
time and again
over numberless
years
 
*

Or that everything
has changed
is
or that everything
goes away
and is replaced
is
or that

(so many are gone)

But,
conversations
over spaghetti
and wine,
the old mixed
with the new:
the stories
that are finished,
the stories
now beginning
 

*
Topping the hill,
falling
into endless sky,
storms stalking
the horizon
their darkness
eating
the fading
light

Mountains crowned
with cumulus

Slant light
on pavement,
aspen leaves,
gold,
blinding off
the river’s water
beside the highway
the song
of the tires
humming 
home.