Ken Craft Poems

This is where I held
my breath--
a stand of red pine,
needles and snowdust
...

Clem buttresses that old house
with bales of hay against the foundation,
rivets metal roofing over buckled
tar paper, and feeds his splitter, revealing
...

When you're broken,
find your Henry David
and simplify. Reach
back, grasp your younger
...

Each day brings the wedding closer,
clapboard and trim painters,
window washers, florists. I wish
I were a Breughel peasant far
...

You see them in the sliding
light of water, the expanding
slips of silver where trout
breathe. You hear
...

Under the frozen dome of December
mornings, the scrim of dawn
not even an orange thread
caught in the eastern branches,
...

Each morning he rises and bows
before me, parable of humility,
paws yawning against slippery slate,
maw stretched, a mute MGM lion.
...

The blue sad light is on again.
Maybe it's the weather. Or the season.
Or the relentless grind of the quotidian.
Maybe it's the "Is that all there is? " of the holidays,
...

The first summer we owned the camp,
we brought my grandmother,
who wore the same one-piece floral bathing suit
each day. I said no, but she took the broom
...

Sometimes, to make sure
You're still here,
Look up for cloud sustenance.
...