1
In
the middle of my life I found myself in a dark wood.
On one side, clouds settled
like three or four trouble notes.
Then they moved, right to left, a slow freight
shuddering by the crossing grade. Or – I was looking
out the grate
as a whistle shifted bars across the gate.
2
In
the middle of life's way I found myself in dark woods.
On a landing a broom
leaned out of a bucket.
Beyond the ferry wake, a slanted plume. Sunrays
slipped,
then caught a jib and mainsail. Runnels hissed
to the rocks. White sheets
cupped and held.
3
In
the midst of life I found I was in a dark wood.
Rain scrimmed the air. It was
all unclear,
a sandblasted flood I squinted through. Great,
I'd
say, and try the other glasses in my pocket
but they only focused drops against
the gray.
Just what I need now, cut loose and nearly blind,
an unknown
coast closed in with rime.
4
Midway
on life's journey I found myself in the dark woods.
At night the island might
still be overgrown with fir,
starless but for piers and porches across water.
Black-green
drooping boughs stir a diffuse
and moonish glow behind the clouds' light cover.
5
In
the middle of the night my daughter's call –
old anger she'll never get
over, oil and vitriol
against too much, too little, pitched and caught again.
Next
night my mother's voice, scratched in pain,
near panic, twisted gut. Back to
the ER
because – what else is there to do for her?
6
In
my middle age, that darkening wood, I found myself
across the continental shelf
from home. The flight back
skimmed high plains. Now I can't recall the place
for a waterglass, which drawer holds stamps.
No light outside since lightning
hit the lamps.
7
Midway
through my life in the dark wood
of Sylvania County, I found it was a hemlock
forest,
a rhododendron hell. What could be more manifest
than native laurel
thickets three stories high
holding pale petal spikes to claps of thunder in
July?
My mother, nearly ninety, will not bathe or brush her hair
but sits
askew all day in the black reclining chair.
8
After
the middle of middle age a vision,
airy or ordinary, will not engage
but
only aggravate a reader. Reactive fission
fuels the middle of middle age. A
vision
from a line of Dante? Rescue mission.
Infernal fizzle pushed to the
nuclear stage
over
the edge of the middle. A middle-aged vision-
ary? Her ordinary will? Disengage
the
dazzle. Any pen to any page.
9
For
the straight road was lost. How hard a thing
to tell what wild, rough, dense
or wooded was.
I turned too soon and drove too far, climbing
a one-lane
gravel path. The gearbox buzzed,
the drop sheered off. Pines on that steep
side.
Mills River understory ginseng and Solomon's seal.
I forced myself
to turn back at the final hairpin.
10
For
I had missed the right road. What hard work
to imagine for you, reader, this
wood, savage and tangled,
and down where we breathe, air like condensed milk.
I
lay low, gave in, adored the genes
that cool my children's bloodlines.
So
bitter, so bitter is it, death is little more.
11
Past
my mother asking for her father,
past my careless girls who husbanded nothing,
no
harbor but clouds, no train but grief,
I left the right road. But the good
I found
may be told: a shale never broken,
a shadow cove, whitewater at
the cleft.
I stepped into the stream, sleepwalker woken
midway – myself
dark words, dark woods.
