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    Before Dark, and After

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      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

     
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