Glimpses of Earth and Sky

Small poems about big spaces

Photo by troy williams on Unsplash

One of the mysterious qualities of a poem is how it can expand or contract a moment. A page and a half to unfold and explore ten minutes of the poet’s life from years ago; eight lines to contain an entire horizon.

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SKY, EARLY EVENING


The sun has slid below the hills, houses, sand dunes, sea.
Now colors slide from the air, a moment between 
the flames of ending day 
and the ripe shadows of night.

Faded just-blue, and streaking slowly across it,
a vapor trail arcs like a rosy chalk-line
toward the quiet slender moon that tilts,   
just seen, between invisible stars.

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CALIFORNIA HILLS
Late Spring, After a Wet Winter


There needs to be a word
for this sweet small season
of gold spun from green on the spindles of the sun,
of late rains raising blushes of new green amid the gold.

There needs to be a word
for one color dazzled together from two,
for ripples over hillsides like light on sea waves,
like spring showers sifting a summer sky.

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[You can listen to an audio recording the poems using the widget above the photograph.]

I scribbled down “Sky, Early Evening” nine years ago to describe a view that had held me enchanted for fifteen minutes or so, standing at a west-facing window in my apartment. A quiet view, in no way spectacular, and I wasn’t sure whether my description of it was a whole poem or maybe a fragment of something larger that, you know, meant something. Every time I come back to it, though, I realize: this is the whole thing, a real thing. Those few lines did their entire job, containing and celebrating one moment out of an infinite skyful.

I started “California Hills” just a few weeks ago, after returning from a long car trip with one of my sisters. In a state that comprises nearly every kind of terrain, California’s rolling grass-covered hillsides are a recurring theme. Typically they’re vivid green for what seems like a minute or two in the late winter and early springtime, then dry to gold for months on end. This year the magical between-colors season lasted for more than a minute, and we got to see it, and I dearly wanted to write about it … and knew, eight lines in, that I’d sung the song I was meant to sing.

The tag-line for this substack is “Poems that greet you with ‘Hey, look at that.’” These two poems are the essence of that greeting: tiny gestures beckoning you to look at something that stretches for miles. What’s the sky doing outside your window, right now? How many shades of green — or gold, or both — can you see from your front door? Poets want to know.