Book cover photo from Wikimedia Commons

The Empty Page

This time of year perhaps the empty page

Should be black instead of white

Bleak and wet and heavy with hibernation

Lie weighty and soggy on the silent desk

Waiting for some harbinger some hope

To leaven the wintry landscape within

Perhaps the page were better made of ice

That I may strap on the old hockey skates

Once more and finding that perfect stretch

Of cold weather without snow strike off

Across the perfect surface taking flight

Without a single word to shatter the ecstasy

© Bill Prindle, 2017

Moon Landing +50

It rained most of that week

So we couldn’t see it anyway

with the naked eye

And the grainy TV imagery

and the muffled voices

From a quarter million miles away

This orbed story seeming so alien

to my lifeguard lifestyle

and the big concert

Coming up in a couple weeks

over in New York State

Or that moony girl

who kept draping herself

         on my white guard stand,

Recalling that when Apollo was announced

We believed what the President said

before Vietnam

And Watergate and stagflation

Opened a continental latrine trench

Between the government

and the people,

Nearly failing to mention that this was only

another Frontier story

another land grab

Of empty spaces occupied by nothing

or mere heathens thus

Ripe for that special Christian rapacity

         forgiven in advance

for bringing the Word

to the wilderness,

Awakening too late to the bitterly plain

         truth that that savage

wisdom is what we needed

All along to keep this singular

blue pearl

From becoming a charcoal-dusted

cratered place

Where a white man’s bootprint

lasts a million years.

          © Bill Prindle, 2019

Apollo 11 bootprint, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Sanctuary

Stomping divots in this ocean of mud

Is like trying to make the earth flat again

And you laugh and I say some people

Are actually trying and not only that but

They would have us unwind the journeys

Of our ancestors across isthmus bridges

Across oceans on ships so tender that

They could not sail even a broad reach

Across rivers and through tunnels at night

Holding hope that some will not be deported

My barn is big enough for six families

At least, enough feet to stomp all the divots

Enough to carry on the farm when I die

Enough for a complete circle around the fire

So let us go out now into the muddy pasture

And ask the horses for those greater hearts

© Bill Prindle, 2019

Horses in the field
by Peter, from Bern, Switzerland
from Wikimedia Commons

I Will Stay

The gully leads the land to the water table

For the water’s sake as a young man

Would lay his coat in mud for the queen

The branch flows all summer gathering

Grasses and birches skirts all billowing

Because the pastures kindly tilt this way

This farm’s eight acres inclined to the sea

Sending water down and down even after

The trees have lifted so much to the sky

All last year I built sacred fires in caves

As high as I could find but in this watershed

The fire circle goes down behind the branch

And I still don’t know how it is I got here

Or why water behaves this particular way

But some love has roped me, and I will stay.

© Bill Prindle, 2018

Sprout Creek
Photo by Julian Colton
from Wikimedia Commons

To My Father on His 100th Birthday

The bent wood of the empty highchair

Darkens each year, even though the caning

Holds up against the long-departed weight

Of your tiny body crying out for its first

Solid foods, even as the influenza raged

Around you and the bodies piled up.

My sister posts a photograph I’ve never seen,

You in your grandfather Lucius’s arms, 

Grandmother Frances stiffly looking on 

In her dark full length dress, the wood

Paneling dark and your father’s darkness

Not yet revealed in his downward loving gaze.

Your eyes alone look outward their innocence

Unfocused on any of the hammers fated later

To fall, your father’s becoming a stockbroker

In 1928, your wife’s madness, your daughter’s

Crib death, the corporate world’s finding

That you were another expendable engineer.

The wondrous light in your eyes appears now

To forgive it all in advance, under your father’s

Eyes saying silently I have made something good

Even though twelve years later he would put

His head in the oven, and thereafter would smoke

Himself to death while you sailed sea and sky.

The walls you built left a shadow so far behind

The scrim of unwanted memory that it is only

Now that I can see him, standing there at thirty

In bright tie and rounded collar tips his gaze

And his father’s gaze on you and your eyes

Only now, in a century’s blink, are my eyes.

© Bill Prindle, 2018

van Campen family portrait in a landscape
by Frans Hals, with the baby lower left
added by Salomon de Bray
Toledo Museum of Art
from Wikimedia Commons

Grooming the Herd in Spring

Beneath these gloved hands

Cowhide on horsehide inseparable

The winter coats fly off in tufts

Revealing the darker the sleeker

The more radiant summer skin.

Down flanks rubbing dried mud

From hocks and fetlocks brushing

Botfly larvae from cannon bones

This heifer’s hide gives its all

In an anointing of earth to earth.

Tonight out in the eastern paddock 

They graze on in watery darkness

Invisible yet shining with a patina 

That only open-handed love knows

How to coax again when the rain 

and the new mud come.

© Bill Prindle, 2017

Arab Simeon Stud
Photo by Jimmy Baikovicius
from Wikimedia Commons

Liturgy

In nomine

Of the water god speaking

in the stream washing

graveled roots of ferns

with all of our grief

Dominus vobiscum

Seen from within the water

may we be among the god

in the water in the root

in the leaf and wing

Confiteor

Having climbed all this way

made this fire confessed

every failing to the flames

I am still not now changed

Kyrie Eleison

This must be the height

from which angelic beings

gaze lovingly upon us even

as we writhe in our beds

Oremus

And even though we don't know

who this is the words still

pour forth in invocation

supplication contemplation

Verbum Domini

And even though words don't speak

to what this fire sees or what

it changes me into words are all

I have to know the aster's heart

Dominus sit in corde

Crystalline earth energy meets

fountains of blessings pouring

into the rag and bone shop

of the most wounded heart

Munda cor meum

By grace a gate is opened

fears fall away breathing

becomes inspiration separation

vanishes in sweet herb smoke

Gloria tibi

By dint of sitting utterly still

on this stone moved for me

There is nothing to do but

behold the blessed valley

Laus tibi

Having no offering no 

Tobacco I offer only water

until nothing is left up here

but to thank and to praise

Eucharist

Under the leaning granite altar

looming above me an exchange

occurs I feel all my relations

with me the sacred hoop whole

Sanctus

This granite this ridge

these trees budding out a

green haze in the ravine

were never not this holy

Regnum et potestas et gloria

My kingdom for a lawyer

so pitiful is my fire now

whose power is already gone

up in this smoky glory

Pax domine

Finally emptied of all I carried

the time comes to descend

reclaiming the daily bread

remaining silent at the center

Agnus dei

This is no sacrifice in the old way

no livestock given away only

the making holy of every aster,

fern, footstep down the mountain

© Bill Prindle, 2017

Asters
Photo by Tony Russell

These Teeth

These teeth would require stout boots

If you wanted to traverse them

Just for sport or perhaps in search

Of the living language that lies 

In the darker cavern just behind.

These teeth don’t take rollerskates

The ones that the frozen lake teeth 

Of the great blond cheerleaders 

Advertise for triumphant swoops

Across their perfectly icy surfaces.

These teeth were made on wellwater

Still hold shades of the grey granite

That still sets the underground tone

Of the New England woods I walked

Thinking about anything but teeth.

These teeth take on new colors

Every year, off-whites of crowns

Browns of coffee, darkening lights

Of red wines Nebbiolos and Cabernets

And Pinots that make the blood sing.

These teeth resemble my father’s

On his last day, gray ruins running

North forever like the stone walls

Of my boyhood woods leading me

Always into country I do not know.

These teeth are the only bones

That show, even though the others

Wait just below the skin 

Or sheath of muscle fascia

To reveal the last white silence.

These teeth are the last barricade

Of good judgment before words

I cannot take back fly forth

To build walls just as invisible

As the loneliness they inflame.

These teeth need something to bite into

Something that feeds the flame

In the soft center of this hard shell

Some food not found on the shelves

Of the store aisles we wander all day.

© Bill Prindle, 2016

Stone wall and bridge; Tolland County, Connecticut
Photo by Ken Holm
Library of Congress
from Wikimedia Commons

Hiking to the Holy Place

Every fern unfurling

Each tiny aster bursting

all the way up 

to the ridge

Says I give it all again

just like last year

says here, take, eat

Feast on this life.

We don’t care if you ride 

the Harleys roaring 

in that wolfpack way 

to the next bar

We don’t care if you drive

tricked out tractors 

hauling trailers 

of what we cannot

wait for one more day

We don’t care if you drink

too much bet 

too much

on the wrong horse

groan all night in your bed.

We don’t care from where

your many greeds arise.

We just keep on giving.

Sitting by the stone altar

I made, the right

crystals in all the right 

quarters wanting only

to protect this valley

I hail all my relations

and do not care

if I am finding

the right words

I am finding

these words.

© Bill Prindle, 2015

Fern unfurling
Photo by Tony Russell

Stafford’s Last Year: Cento

Old mistakes come calling: no life

happens just once. Whatever snags

even the edge of your days will abide.

You are a turtle with all the years on your back.

Maybe people have to go in and out of shadows

till they learn that floating, that immensity;

maybe somebody has to explore what happens

when one of us wanders over near the edge.

Whatever fits will be welcome, whatever

steps back in the fog will disappear,

as you will, wherever you go after this day,

just a stop by the road, and a glimpse of someone’s life.

Is there a way to be gone and still

belong? Travel that takes you home?

It’s heavy to drag, this big sack of what

you should have done.

And now if there is any light at all 

it knows how to rest on the faces of friends.

Touches of wind. The room you have

in the world is ready to change.

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among

things that change. But it doesn’t change.

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

You don’t ever let go of the thread.

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found.

Well, it was yesterday. And the sun came,

Why

It came.

© Bill Prindle, 2015

Sources: lines selected from poems written by William Stafford in 1993, the last year of his life. The last three lines end the poem he wrote the day he died. All selections from The Way it Is.

Turtle popping its head above water
Photo by William Warby
from Wikimedia Commons