SUNSET CRATER

Here there is no sea,
but the day is bright with the spill and hill
of the shore-homing wind like gusty waves
and I all but see
grey gulls break flight
at the rise of night
to scatter like seedpuffs
in the down-beach wind.

The sun on the crater snow
is like sea sparkle on brown sand
and the rush and tug of the air
ripples the hair
on the freckled back of my hand.
It is evening without birdwings
as I stand
overlooking the long silence
of peopleless places
dark under the dropping sun.

Through windlashed tears, everywhere
great eye-blinding lengths of earth
so measureless immense
the single mind confronted
turns inward against the multiplicity,
appalled and shaken
at the manifest indifference of the sky
to the foredoomed manifesto of the peaks
which, breaking, seem to say,
I rise and stand, I stand,
while everywhere they fall and fade,
subside and flow away
like giant abominable snowmen
rumbling their mindless protest
down to trembling talus
and creek bed barrows
and dying in the April hemorrhage
of their streams.

Published in Poems Southwest, edited by A. Wilbur Stevens, Prescott
College Press, Prescott, Arizona, 1968.

__________

FOR SHELBY
(01-24-03 to 06-26-12)

Never once did I think
that daybreak would bring
a time for sweeping up the heart
and putting love away.

Though I swept up the den
she shared with Scamp
and took down her leash
from its hook on the wall
and placed it with her collar,

I never believed that the hurting heart
ever puts away the love it feels
but only gives an extra measure
to those sentient creatures that we treasure.

Compassion enlarged the heart
Gautama says.

J.D. McGehee  July 13, 2012