(another crappy exercise)

I wait before the hill.
The others have become dark
figures at the top.
Camera swinging about my neck,
I climb, and the heels of my feet
dig into sand. With my toes
I draw the character for tree:
The landscape relents, and wind
covers it with a gust --
Sweat, gone cold with nightfall. A man
in the distance is saddling his horse,
A quiet couple is shouldering their bags.
At the summit, they are looking up at a chrome moon.

Tearing the fronds from a leaf's underside,
he sits slouched where sun hardens three wide cracks -
on the island the ground yields to no depth.
He takes a plastic spoon and digs the first
hole, and polishes his fingernails white.
Sinking into humus, his feet go last.

House

(coauthored exercise)

Once did the tiller a house
Cut out of weeds;
A thinning, yellow shade,
That covered moss and seed.
It slept and slept; a thought
Grew on the sill;
Like darkened fields a tired room holds
Its curtains still.



Wind

- Lizette Woodworth Reese

Now has the wind a sound
Made out of rain;
A misty, broken secretness,
That drenches road and pane.
It drips and drips; a hush
Falls on the town;
Like golden clods an old tree shakes
Its apples down.

Flight

In the square of dark window an island
moors places where the hills' slouch ends--
hidden
in an echo of wells, dull spoons.

Glass polished in altitude bears
itself up with fronds of water
curling from cold
and below,
lit pins. The human pins grow
bright