Before Dark, and After
Before Dark, and After
A Collection of Poems
by
Bernard Fancher
Copyright 2012 by Bernard Fancher
All rights reserved
without the author’s permission.
***
Table of Contents
Enclosure
First Light
Flight
Storm Warning
Dare
Going Home
Arid Dream
Aural Journey
A Field Guide to the Birds
Fox Grapes
Feeding Horses
In Praise of Existential Awareness
Full Moon Fever
Between the Lightning and the Lightning Bug
Diminuendo
Early Spring
Curvature
Northern Night
Once on a Blue Moon
Moment
Our Walk, First Thing this Morning
Parting
Aftermath
Snow Moon
The Leonid Meteor Shower
Shy of Heaven
Tenuousness
Riding Blind at Night
Three Crows
I Went for a Walk
Midnight on Moss Lake
Before Dark
Afterglow
***
Enclosure
Beneath the tree where the young buck nuzzled
The ground picking green acorns out of dried leaves,
I sat in the half tire swing only moments away
From learning this place was mine, a few feet
Away from where the young deer years later stood
Entirely unaware of my ghost presence, close enough
To reach out and, if not touch, at least scare him;
I stand in the open doorway at the front of the house
In midwinter now, considering the doe
Who stood entranced before my first fire, wondering
If she might be the granddame of the young buck
Come back years later like an homage, or echo.
Something always antedates something else,
Making memory or imagination or pure dreaming
The stuff of stories and poems and plays;
From the center of this same tree
Thoughts tossed blithely off return. I embrace
Them below an arc of limbs, rooted to this place.
***
First Light
What makes me think to go again
to where the field bends back from the sky—
perhaps to recover a lost conceit of myself
as a modern-day Ponce de León
visiting some part of the world for the first time?
Ten years on, a red fox lies perfectly still on its side
as if sleeping sound in the hay. The dogs rush ahead
remembering the ridge-top chance meeting with a tom
turkey coming, some years ago, the opposite way.
Shouldn’t they anticipate such a meeting again?
Admitting life is a mystery, what is to be lost
in the expectation of reliving past experience?
After a moment’s further reflection I suppose
that’s unrealistic, and instead of permitting their untamed pursuit
of presentiment, I call them back, kneeling to pet them
and so preserve the vital element of our surprise.
I remember the herd of deer discovered a dozen years ago now
gathered at first light round the still-hidden sump of a spring,
and rising, proceed slowly, consciously keeping
the dogs at my heel, climbing to what seems the top of the world—
there to observe, just below us, the startled ghosts of those deer
standing still, all but frozen.
I clap my hands, once, and they disappear.
***
Flight
Fleeing
the deer flicker through trees
reversing the process of transubstantiation
going from here to gone.
Beau is halfway across the field before I see him
hell-bent to follow
shadow into darkness
becoming shadow himself
disappearing.
***
Storm Warning
These insubstantial snowflakes drifting on air
may or may not be the precursor of heavier snow.
All ready
I envision the fields full, the electric lines
laden, the tall narrow trees lining the woods
themselves lined
standing like impassive dark sentries,
the lengths of their windward sides exposed,
plastered white.
I see myself on skis first time all winter,
the dogs plowing ahead, breaking trail
on an old logging road
until in one place we step aside and listen to nothing,
hearing in stealth a silence more meaningful
than words.
I detect the dogs’ panting, my own dissipating breaths.
From a void evolves a lone squirrel’s incessant
soft clucking.
Under all, the howl of wind imposes its presence,
approaching unseen, making ready, biding its own
unmeasured time.
***
Dare
Fire deflects off shear rock
behind where I stand
before the open beyond.
Like water,
sparks fall from the precipice
or float drifting off to the sky.
By and by, I turn away
not to burn
or to drown
but to quietly sleep
in a soft crevice
of warm stone and low flame,
only dreaming a dream,
a phantasm of what I might do.
***
Going Home
What waits beyond
the hill in the entire
unlit land of open fields
and dark woods
is nothing other than
a place to come home to.
Deer stand frozen
alongside the road,
eyes liquid green
before the car’s passing.
The fields absorb starlight
as the woods absorb the fields,
while just beyond the far window
a light warms my door.
***
Arid Dream
What strange bird flies
circling the dark void of the back field?
Hemmed by woods on three sides,
compelled to revolve a black hole
in the landscape, it utters by turns
a plaintive, solitary Gaaack,
seeming to count the completion of each circle
before lapsing again into silence.
I imagine a lost seabird, maybe an albatross
(whose young lie somewhere dead, filled to bursting
with plastic scavenged doodads)
searching for its mate, perhaps thinking,
birdlike, the dark plain beneath its wings a safe harbor
it dare not touch for fear of disturbing
the dream it skirts yet distrusts to settle upon;
so continually it circles a vast field of night—
nearly frantic, it seems, and inconsolable—
waiting to hear a reply forever lodged in my throat.
***
Aural Journey
You discover yourself
risen from snow, floating
like a
wisp of mist
levitating in cold moonlight
borne aloft,
propelled by disassociation,
floating diagonally
above wire-enclosed fields
barbed with the subliminal threat
of capture.
But not even trees
in the woods impede entrance, rather
your wraith presence opens
and closes around them,
and so you pass through
a dreamt realm of your own being,
being what you dream
and dream to become.
***
A Field Guide to the Birds
Scarlet tanager, indigo bunting,
green heron.
The words are jewels
to the mind, illuminating something elusive.
A cardinal steps about on a sleeping lilac
draped with Virginia creeper.
Snow lies deep in the yard, a little early for bluebirds.
I look to the dead limb stretched above the kitchen sink window,
seeing not even a flicker
of pileated woodpecker in the still embalmed trees.
An old Peterson’s field guide
reveals the persistence of desire (or obsession) for knowing
what’s what.
Is that a bob-white or bobolink
imprinted on the curled green cloth cover?
Never mind, I remind myself, recognizing it for the guide
it is, realizing everything we know belongs to chance, opportunity
and change.
***
Fox Grapes
As I go about the task of eliminating weeds from the garden,
vines like brown ropes secured to the ground
cover the condensery across the road from the barn;
they covertly make ready to issue forth green tentacles of new growth
that will curl inevitably about every part of a place I’ve given up on.
It is nearly time to till, and yet still I work on hands and knees
breaking down brittle stems of dead burdocks,
collecting their clinging and yet dispersing seed balls
in a determined attempt to stave off the next generation.
Only mid-April, but already too warm for the dogs
who lie raspily breathing in the pussy willow’s indeterminate shadow,
the weather has gone in one day from chill to prematurely subtropical.
I reach over the dog lying nearest to me,
allowing my forearm to brush his fur coat. Allowing it too,
he merely stretches a hind leg, opening and again immediately closing
his eyes. A stick-tight has grabbed hold of my skin,
clinging like a disembodied pincer, not wanting to let go.
Isn’t that the way of us all?
I ask myself the question in all sincerity, knowing
I am blessed. Looking up to see the wind pushing clouds,
I vocalize contentment and pleasure at once, practicing a frugal austerity.
I tell myself and the dogs: Even here, with each thing, we must decide
what to keep and what to discard.
***
Feeding Horses
for Vicki
After feeding the pigs,
and stopping by Mura’s for hay,
we watched the sun
set as we rode the dirt road home.
Racing darkness,
we threw bales from the pickup,
heaving them to your horses
while through the paddock door
I watched Fox Hill bathed in twilight
and imagined a fox
skirting the delineation of efflorescent field
and wood, hunting something.
If such interludes comprise eternity,
were we to live forever,
I could not ever be happier.
Yet I suspect the best we can hope
is to live as we can
until the only thing left is to die.
When that time comes
I want to be the first to go.
But if I am left,
leave me at least the image of you
standing, enclosed by a barn
open to the world, flinging hay to your horses,
chaff and hair flying, wild with wind.
***
In Praise of Existential Awareness
The rhubarb is in a state of wrinkled emergence
behind the barn and tilled garden.
A few days ago, I picked a single asparagus spear
and laid it down in the grass, for later.
This morning, I heard the happy chortling of a house wren
for the first time since late last summer.
Bees buzz within a cloud of cherry tree blossoms
in the front yard.
The bluebirds are already prolific; a clutch of four
sky blue eggs nestle deep in a cup of dead grass
behind the slanting door of the nest-box out back.
Meanwhile, a vine and weed and paper trash fire
smolders unattended in the half dug gravel pit,
sending a blue acrid plume drifting up
from behind the low north-side slope East of here.
Not that it matters. Or maybe it does.
I seem to recall the Buddha’s teaching:
everything exists behind or beyond or below something else,
and so wait for all to be revealed, at the world’s infinite leisure.
***
Full Moon Fever
for Nicole
Driving at dusk
out of Albany light
and dust, I pass by Crescent
and Half Moon, yearning
for backcountry.
Somewhere off a railroad
cul de sac
under a hillside of yuppie horse farms
in infringing darkness
I park along a solitary track
and walk up through a wildflower field
soaked with starlight
under a floating full moon
rising alone among transparent
cirrus, composing
in my circular head this incipient poem
for you my sleeping love
three hundred miles away.
***
Between the Lightning and the Lightning Bug
The difference between the right word and the almost right word
is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.
—Mark Twain
I perceive it before becoming entirely awake
as it bounds against the canopy, let in by a window
to flash repeatedly across the cathedral ceiling
in an apparent effort to get back out.
Each time it ignites—so successfully disguising itself
as something animate
that I wish to rise and go as well
into the outer darkness—the conviction reforms
and re-establishes the idea my mind has lit upon,
imagining a rare display of Northern Lights descending
over our lower latitude, to grace all who would see.
Thus I am enticed and ready to embrace possibility
as I exit the back door, feeling inside
attuned to the pulse of an unworldly presence.
I don’t expect God, at least not to reveal himself so blatantly,
so am not disappointed to find an aurora of restrained lightning
bucking up against clouds
lying barely an inch or two above the polar horizon.
Once, long ago, riding down an unlit back road
I encountered that very same light in miniature
where a solitary firefly
pulsing below the leaves of a low hanging branch
illuminated its place in the surrounding darkness.
/> Perceiving a wonderful thing then, I decide now again
to wait and watch in amazement.
***
Diminuendo
Clumped snow
streaks the window view.
The sky is gray.
Near trees stand dark
against the midrange horizon.
The falling/fallen snow
merging with dusky woods
in an indefinable distance
of hills somewhere across the creek
becomes zone by imperceptible zone
the value of pure night.
***
Early Spring
The beasts of the field are still
in their stillness. They sleep
under the thin rim of a moon,
breathing air cooled in the hills
and thin rills of dim meadows
where far distant barn windows
cast pinpricks of light across a dark valley.
Field mice and moles
hid in the nearby ravened wood
lie safe from both hovering falcon
and more decisive horned owl
which, yet being beings, are still beasts, after all.
Shall we count the spotted fawn
lying ensconced in the grass?
What of the missing doe mother?
Is ‘beast’ a damning or exculpatory word?
Perhaps ‘fox’ describes
the intention of thought more precisely,
its already shifting presence conforming to intractable space
at once both above and under a log.
Just yesterday, I found seven hairless infant
rabbits, a half dozen which fit securely
side by side in the palm of one hand.
I wish to believe they lie still
safely composed where I left them,
tucked in a furry burrow
under a bleached, split-locust fence post.
Maybe fox, coyote, or bear
deserve praise after all for conforming
our vague impressions to imprecise, prancing shadows.
In moonlight, for moons and moons