Antares and Betelgeuse greet the September morning,
Overshone by Jupiter's and Venus's reflected glory;
The great nebulae, already hidden by Dawn's reluctant rising,
Must wait until winter has redressed night's majesty
And the world's repromised birth lies still beneath the earth.

Let me another take
And life would prove less sweet;
Should we a different road have walked,
We would have found our separate destinations
And never know this love.

Dropping its small green fruit on the ground,
The apple tree up the corner
Is at least a century too late to benefit the deer
That once roamed these hills
When Virginia was farmland and a gun,
A sign of good citizenship.  Still is in some parts.

Men, men, sitting in a row,
A handful of women, but mostly men
Riding the morning early commute.
The women sit alone, seldom talking;
The men greet each other boisterously,
Barking loudly at their friends and acquaintences.

I watch each new man enter,
Attempting to gauge their potential
For harm and sexual adventure.
If I am wrong or mix the two,
Disaster may await at my morning bus stop,
Or on my return in the late afternoon
-- Or something quite interesting
After a drink or two.

My father left me before I was thirty,
Died there sitting in front of his ham set,
Sipping cheap sauterne and smoking menthol cigarettes
That spring two years after my daughter's birth.
In the morning she played ball with grandpa,
In the afternoon we visited a friend across the river:
By the time we returned he lay stone dead
On the cold concrete floor of the garage.
I closed his eyes, kissed his lips one last time,
Then rose to walk out to explain to my daughter
Where her grandpa went.

Full moon sinking in the west,
A bright full wheel of good parmisan;
High clouds illuminated by the sun
Still stuck below the eastern horizon.

A cool fall morning at summer's end,
Still dark as daylight slowly shortens,
Shadowed by night's lingering hand,
The world awaits for day to begin.

When I was young I looked for ghosts,
Checked if my guardian angel was beside me,
Waited for my God to tell me my vocation,
Listened at night for the thoughts of aliens
Trying to contact me from some distant planet.

I discovered that the world was quite silent,
Vacant except for my family and my classmates;
No one waited to reward me for my existence,
No prophet lurked to revelate
The path that lay before me.

I remembered nothing from before
The moment of my birth, knew no one
Who had died and come back again
To tell me something waited more than darkness,
That life had some greater meaning
Other than what I would give it myself.

When I was young and looked for ghosts,
I found only myself and a universe
Which barely took time to notice
The attention I thought was
Only properly mine.

The whiskey and cigars,
The men without marriage,
The bombs, the guns,
And the instigations of The Rising,
Aunt Maude was not a traditional woman,
But always the proper one
To do what was needed,
What was necessary.

I sleep with her niece
Who carries on the family business,
The child Maude spoke of
When they met last century,
The young girl she once held,
Observed closely, and asked
Ah, she's beautiful
But can she handle a gun?

I'll let history be the judge of that
But I think Maude would be quite proud
Of the life her niece has led
And what she has accomplished
In the decades since Maude's death:
Irish genes run true, The Rising lives,
One generation to the next,
In the heart of the one who shares my bed.

Five million years,
One hundred fifty thousand generations
Separates us from the other apes,
Sixty million menstruations,
And unknown numbers of women
Dead in childbirth
As our brains grew faster than our hips.

We are not so different, now and then,
Wanting only to see our babies born
Without deformity, our children grown,
Strong and healthy, and, if we are lucky,
See our grandchildren before we die.

A whisp of clouds,
A white full moon
Too bright to focus nakedly;
A touch of fall,
A touch of winter,
The trees still green but dying;
Spring will not come
If summer does not end
And the encroaching chill find us
Wrapped in warm furs
Around our campfires.