poem, can you show me
how to love the broken road i’m on,
how to gaze upon what hovers
in a brilliant bank of cloud,
and not shrink from what shines.
bring me to a fallow field
of milky wish and bramble,
lean into the letting go
the going forth from here.

kf | Training Field Road, Sugar Hill, NH

cue the lone figure.
cue loneliness
wrapped in its weathered shake.
make space at the table
for the season that breaks you,
for the year you spent looking
at faraway things.

kf | Rocks Estate, Bethlehem, NH

hello! hello!
cries the unfolding event,
this moment’s matter at hand.
no blinking, or thinking
there is anywhere else.
you there, humming
driving along.
rounding the bend
of your beautiful life.

kf | Route 302, Lisbon, NH

tree, i know your branches,
i’ve memorized your silhouette.
know the way you hold the sky by heart.
have heard you murmuring
secrets to the roof.
‘don’t mind me’
is my way of saying:
‘please tell me again.
oh tell me, tell me, tell me again.’

kf | backyard, Bethlehem, NH

i came here,
made a promise
to attend.
made a practice
of being
small in a body
on a planet
looking up.
withstanding
any weather
in order to witness,
in order to wonder,
in order to wake.

kf | Main Street, Littleton, NH

i want answers from the landscape,
take my moody questions
to the edge, let them break me.
let myself be a thing that is broken,
a frozen body of failure, of fissure.
until i come to understand:
what is broken in me
is precisely
where the light comes from.

kf | Lake Christopher, Bryant Pond, ME

poems wait frozen
in the winter pond
while blue breaks through
a habit of cloud
like a bright answer.
on this day (on any)
would that i could give you this:
a moment to know yourself
as a body in the every body,
as a body made of light.

kf | backyard, Bryant Pond, ME

towards and away
hold hands underwater.
we are driving home
with a car full of minutes.
with a road full of puddles
that hold the sky open,
with a sky full of holding us
driving us home.

kf | Interstate 91 South, Bartlett, VT

is it true
what you look for
is looking for you?
and what name for this blue-
this reciprocal physics
of longing for home?

kf | backyard, Bethlehem, NH

linger with me
is all i ask anything.
is all i want
from what wants to be known.
ink takes the page
like an idea, dawning.
one by one, those fingers
unfurl.

kf | backyard, Bethlehem, NH

branches, like an alphabet,
arrange themselves endlessly
across a blank page of sky,
while the wind works its way
through all possible utterance.
how your eyes love a surprise,
say to you on your winter-walk:
‘see, we were made
for just this kind of happiness.’

kf | Cross Street, Bethlehem, NH

hold open, hold up,
hold back the curtain.
tree, can you hold
daylight’s last minute,
while i look for my courage
to face the longest night.

kf | backyard, Bethlehem, NH

blind-eye sky,
you are relentless.
but so is my promise
to love you with these lines.
parallel is another way to say:
i see you see you see you see you.

kf | Jodo Way, Bethlehem, NH

it’s winter and i wonder
where they went:
the fledglings i made fugitive
by denying they were part of me.
oh castaway selves,
come home, come prodigal,
there’s room for you now.
the whole year, a house
we can walk around in,
decide where things go,
say window, say welcome mat.
come home fly home land here.

kf | backyard, Bethlehem, NH

planet of hope,
planet of harm,
moment inhabited
by blue recognition:
from the window of ‘here we are again here’
i wonder: will the spinning
be enough
to shake us,
wake us up?

kf | Jodo Way, Bethlehem, NH

here, where the days
are growing darker, we say:
give us this day, our daily grief.
to lay it down
we must look up.
to understand
means standing under
but also, inside of,
in the heart of, what is dark,
what has not yet turned the corner
into light.

kf | Jodo Way, Bethlehem, NH

by the time
you reach the roof
you’ve forgotten
what got in your way.
finger-light hieroglyphs
take the grey,
make it blue.
take the night,
give it back to you
brighter.

kf | Main Street, Franconia, NH

take heart, branches like glass.
the cold is not a permanent condition,
just how it is now.
this moment makes a room
for your loneliness,
some walls to hold what only you
will ever hear: the quiet howl
of your midnight grief
as it rises,
then quiets.

kf | Jodo Way, Bethlehem, NH

if any gift, then grant me this:
that i might lose the monochrome
of all my grey assumptions.
that i might come to find the more
(and more and more)
the feathered edge
of what it means to open.

kf | backyard, Bethlehem, NH

the name for branches holding snow
is ‘all this promise.’
and light can lift a weight of grey
and a sudden shake of wind
waits at the edge of quiet
to sing, ‘release, release.’

kf | Route 302, Bretton Woods, NH

grey day, your mouth is grim,
your horizon, a clenched jaw.
i am moving through you
like a car past a field
the color of missing color:
what’s closest is a ruddy rush,
what’s far away seems steady.

kf | Meadow Street, Littleton, NH

listen, take a paper clip,
pinch the grey edge of what we call
‘today’s lonely errands.’
later, thumb through them.
marvel at how many,
how bright they might have been
in the good company
of ‘move closer not away.’

kf | Meadow Street, Littleton, NH