To Make a Frost Flower

Athens, Georgia

December 14, 2015; revised 2016

You could go a whole life 

scarcely aware of ephemera. 

How frost flowers grace 

the morning hours in unkempt 

ditches, ragged shoulders, 

borders and abandoned fields 

that first hard freeze of fall. 

Consider the white crownbeard  

how it grows. It flourishes 

in heat of summer, flowers 

ugly early autumn, leaves 

a stick carcass standing 

barren to the bitter wind 

that rattles down the winter. 

But come the quiet dawn 

when cold envelops open 

fields and seeps inside 

the hardened earth — 

when morning crackles 

frostweed blooms. Up 

from old roots, sap bleeds 

through breached stems, 

oozing into open air

as frozen locks of cotton 

candy, silver swirls 

of crystal clouds leaven 

its now broken body. 

Translucent grace is born 

to morning, gone by noon. 

Wounded by winter the weed 

turns guts to ghostly flowers 

and waits for the inconceivable 
spring to rise again from roots.

Last November Sunset

Glade Farmhouse, Georgia

November 30, 2002; revised December 2015

The last November sunset 

darkens to shadows 

on the stubble horizon 

when off a distant ridge, December 

wind clears warmth 

from a once promising day

and the heart of a hundred billion 

suns smears cold 

light across velvet silence. 

A spare beauty bears the hint 

of primal heat 

through widening gulfs 

to fallow souls rooted in lost time 

waiting for winter 

to spring new seed from sweet decline.

From the Deck of the New Horizons

Athens, Georgia

February 7, 2016

I have been here before, swept 

to the stars by an artist’s rendition 

bound in my childhood Book 

of Knowledge. Lost in the pages 

on Pluto, I stood on a cracked 

and frozen plain where Sol is 

but the brightest star whose light 

is hours old. From eternal 

twilight I turned my back 

to the sun-bathed Earth, seared 

by the ancient, wandering call, 

set off to inhabit infinity. 

-

On a farther end of forever 

I find myself as in a dream 

sailing shotgun on a spacecraft 

the size of a grand piano 

at the climax of a nine-year fling 

approaching the double-dwarf 

planetoid world which waltzes 

with Charon face to face 

on a multi-century solar swing 

in two/three time with Neptune. 

-

I fly by the moons of Hydra and Styx 

the realm of Kerberos and Nix 

dodging the darkened pole of Charon 

covered with cryo-geyser debris 

I shoot past the methane plains of Pluto 

over the frozen Sputnik Planum 

above the Virgil Fossa Canyon 

land where ice volcanos flow.

I see a strangely familiar world — 

a touch of haze in the light blue sky 

as warm days climb to fifty-three Kelvin

across the fields of crystallized nitrogen 

mountains of ice as high as the Rockies 

dusted with hydrocarbon snow.

-

I have been here before, swept 

aloft to far-off worlds. Now 

I gaze behind to a sun-bathed 

youth lost in a dream that could 

never come close to riding 

the deck of the New Horizons 

Pluto in the rear-view mirror 
universe ahead.

Photo by NASA
/ Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
/ Southwest Research Institute

A Prayer for Angie

Athens, Georgia
January 30, 2016; revised February 5, 2016

Shackled to perceptual chains
we face our trials as if alone,
beyond all hope — but faith sustains.

Baffled by competing claims,
we grasp beliefs until we’ve grown
so wedded to perceptual chains

that when our efforts end in vain
and earthly options come undone
in fear and trembling — faith sustains.

We’ll stumble through a vale of shame
confused and lost where doubt is sown
about our own perceptual chains

until at last no path remains
in dark and blessed moments blown
beyond all hope — where faith sustains.

Released from clinging thoughts, we’ll gain
new clarity to find our home.
We’ll soar beyond unshackled chains
and bask in Love — yes, faith sustains.