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Tom Aldrich Poem
..just then
It was just there, a few weeks ago,
When the Sun was high;
Nestled with Fleabane;
Pillowed in Stitchwort.
Barely fern-like and feathery, just new,
A small Astilbe, from somewhere.
Growing was newer, just then,
Hinting boundlessness, endlessness;
Stirring in Bindweed;
Rising in Buttercups.
This slanting-orange morning, just now,
Spade in hand to save the Astilbe, I find it gone;
Taken by Redroot,
Fallowed by Sorrel.
Barely reddish, silent, nubile green, just new,
The small Astilbe from somewhere, now gone!
I guess it was a moment’s treasure, just then.
Like oblique light upon the wood, just now.
Or parched Cocklebur,
Or withered Hop.
Copyright © Tom Aldrich | Year Posted 2015
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Tom Aldrich Poem
Dog Star
The clarity with which youthful vision perceives the world
Is increasingly fogged by the successive days of life.
Simple magnanimity is replaced by complex reservation.
Knowledge is replaced by uncertainty.
Hope is replaced by the leaden awareness of the cold laws of chance, and of time’s passage,
By the degeneration of familiar forms,
By the merciless reaping of the best in human spirit:
Gazing upon the heavens and the deep stillness of those constant lights,
Searching course of purpose lack; unsettled certainty, brain benumbing.
Castor and Pollux, lucid pilot stars, begin to calm the fever of my blood,
Settling upon me a vision of a mystic green and silver thread that links existence round.
And yet, sadness when sylphs withdraw, and Ariel weeping for Belinda flies,
And Umbriel, a dusky melancholy sprite, as ever sullies the fair face of night...
Down to central earth, the realm of rocky truth.
Repairing to search the gloomy, yet whitely glowing, cave
Where, sharp-witted and dull-eyed, a god,
Ankle deep in sterile and lifeless mud,
Moved in a rhythm perfect to reason.
Yet delicately astray to hope;
Separate from all the golden harmonies
Ordained by the measure of bowel and heart;
Machined cortex, sailing through gaunchious deeps, unimaginable heights,
Built step upon step; Cheops’ pyramid a fly speck by comparison.
Still unknown, unnoticed, the green and silver thread......
Unbend the substantial back, honest god!
Upward cant the neck!
Toil not; drink green and silver wine as the Dog star rules!
(The cricket sounds sweetly from the leaves and the jonquil blows softly.)
Cant the neck! Observe….
Phantasm swimming in space,
Covered all over with visible power and beauty.
Green and silver interlaced, the whole its parts beminifies.
Endemion, Diana, and Pan ooze from mesh of mass and law as limpid condensements on cold granite:
Man’s lonely vigil, a warmth that lifts magic… creates,
Imbedding blue-green strands.
Reason fails; life begins!
Copyright © Tom Aldrich | Year Posted 2016
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Tom Aldrich Poem
Missouri Winter
Passing in tall grasses of winter meadows,
Brisk winds of cobalt blue skies;
The bite of pure cold stinging our cheeks,
A feeling of contentment in our souls.
…a time of crystalline immediacy, the winter-clean moment!
Through the woods and fields near home,
Phil, Lee, Billy, and I (with Timmy behind) rambling careless;
Sharing myth and magic, as all was new
Before the setting of the sun.
… a time of no past, no future!
The old deserted barn, full of pigeons white and gray,
Soon scattered by our young zeal, spent on winter's air;
One circle round and back to meet again,
And once more the rudeness of boys rends winter.
Fifty years since field and barn were winter forevers,
And tall winter grasses were imprinted by our timeless ramblings;
Looking up at winter's sky without a care, our spirits free;
Only the scent of frozen hay and winter's air.
…a time of pure exuberance, of the instant!
This new winter brings its crisp melancholy.
Another solstice now, and thoughts of timeless days,
Rolling back to fifty years gone by,
An icy, orange-brilliant sun in scraggy, distant trees.
…a time of frost on tall grasses in now distant meadows.
Copyright © Tom Aldrich | Year Posted 2015
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Tom Aldrich Poem
A Man of Green
(Valentine’s Day)
Blast breathed, bob booted, fiercely tramping, he sweeps down upon the land, hard browed, frozen white, bellowing,
Rude Boreas, the prince of winter, rages, the very rocks withering in his path, his power ultimate, the cold of Satan his liege lord, spent upon the hapless world, in frigid swales, twixt tortured trees, in winter’s scraggle,
midst hilltops bleak, whose hoary frames becrack an icy, kindless sky,
His profound frost’s depth hints that light could lose.
Mortals shudder, birds enclose themselves, becoming smaller still.
All pray this prince shall soon pass.
In earnest fright we take small, guileful hope in his raving’s crystalline wake.
Yet, ‘neath his glacial countenance,
the rime bedecked adamantine glaze,
the polar beard, there glints a hope of green,
A brownish earthen smudge warms at alabaster nape.
Perchance brightening Boreas’ stern eye’s crystal spark of winter,
there now gladly grows a fleck of Sol.
Copyright © Tom Aldrich | Year Posted 2015
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Tom Aldrich Poem
A Banded Woolly Bear
Quiet road.
Autumn sun,
Parting leaves;
Warm light pools.
An earnest Woolly Bear
Crossing, pool to pool,
Urgently cautious,
Towards some important thing!
No bird notices, no car yet,
No winter yet.
Just an earnest Wooly Bear
Alone, towards something important.
What importance I cannot know,
On the silent road, for now.
Looking down, I wish the Woolly Bear well,
And hurry on.
Copyright © Tom Aldrich | Year Posted 2015
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Tom Aldrich Poem
The Forever Bees
Spring passed without them…
Their forever hum of summer was silent;
no hopeful tending to timid crocus,
no ceaselessness in the heat of the coreopsis field,
none of their hurry in the lazy slanting of passing goldenrod afternoons.
The forever bees did not come this year…
Loveless, my neighbor’s zucchini did not bear.
Copyright © Tom Aldrich | Year Posted 2015
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Tom Aldrich Poem
Pan’s Frolicsome Guffaw
’Tis the eve of The Equinox.
Methinks I hear midst Boreas’ frozen rattlings,
an unsticking of great Pan’s frolicsome guffaw;
a cheering hint of his sweet pipe!
The warming sun doth his winter’s musings thaw,
his slumberous desire arousing.
His torpid chill’d soul methinks unbends
in vernal cabbage nigh, in newly trickled streams;
Finish’d then to be, his frosty
abjuration of sweet Syrinx!
Copyright © Tom Aldrich | Year Posted 2015
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Tom Aldrich Poem
Wind, Time, and the River
It’s louder now,
once but a vernal whisper,
more hollow now; a moan, almost.
once a trickle, now a torrent;
a frigid wind, once warmed by life’s summer,
now gone cold in the glacier of time;
now a relentlessly flowing, a howling gale;
once warm eyes of friends,
fading in the cruel breath of time!
Copyright © Tom Aldrich | Year Posted 2015
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Tom Aldrich Poem
Dolichonyx Oryzivorus
spiritus lapsae
Spring has come.
Redwings in marshes,
declaring ownership of
reeds!
Rice Birds!
Dolichonyx Oryzivorus!
Bobolinks!
Redwing cousins,
hopping in the yard;
more up than along!
Long thinking, along;
maybe I'm wrong?
Bobolink singing,
more up than along!
Copyright © Tom Aldrich | Year Posted 2015
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Tom Aldrich Poem
Back to Vapors
A mild winter sun sets blazing orange.
Mist rising from the mirroring pond,
sightly blurring sharp-outlined
black skeletons of summer trees.
The stillness of gray vapors holds silence in thrall!
At pond's edge I ask my friend Jim,
the astronomer,if he seeks to understand:
With a gentle, encompassing sweep of arm,
Jim gathers the silence of the pond to his heart,
his hand resting there a moment:
Directly, then, with wan-wise, glance,
Jim says: " Yes, but ...here.....now, you know!"
Slightly smiling, then, he turns his gaze
back to vapors!
Copyright © Tom Aldrich | Year Posted 2015
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