Reflections:
Red Clay Sunrise

This Yankee come-here, 

Virginian by opportunity and choice,

met the mountain singers 

and the city music-makers,

met the unvoiced despair 

of poor hope in Richmond streets

and in shacks along hillside hollers,

saw the new ships building 

in harbors where old

ships once brought crazy hoping 

hungry pioneers up

the James River towards 

Jefferson’s westward vision,

Declaration of rising sunsets,

met the patriots who

fought their own chains while 

forging black hands to harsh fields,

met the new wayfarers 

in Reston and Richmond,

building business from 

nothing and hard ideas, 

remet the American birthplace 

of Virginian legacies,

and found this place of 

red soil and lost tobacco

still ready for the passion of plows, 

new order in a new land

where many hands can 

still make Good Work

with our one Common Weal.

 

Assignation

One blood red azalea

beside a pink rhododendron

at the mouth of a pass

of the fog-smoked Blue Ridge

as a downstream

of spring water

boils its essence off

in a breath-smoked whisper

 

Panoramas

My light year

times infinity

extends behind

in a shadow

from atop Old Rag–

The horizon leans

me vertiginous

into someone else’s

dream–

Who is that boy

raking the creek

with a divining

stick

until it becomes

the Shenandoah?

Maybe he was guided

by too much sunlight

and burns now

with so much

that is red–

There be dragons

and a myriad of things

squirming at the bottom

of that water,

rich in a muck

that forgetting will still

from its roil–

I wake to myself

like an uplift of rock

that suddenly arose

from lowlands

to find it had become

this mountain–

Silence echoes

my repeating self–

as I have used up

every snippet

from too hard listening

in the sunset

for the music

of the spheres–