While idylls typically evoke airy pastoral themes, these root to an older, tragic tradition. Threads of man, elements, and seasons play in and out, weaving quest, mortality, landscape, and dream in four poems penned over forty years ago then boxed away, now unearthed, dusted off, and let to breathe — "Old Lives," a late-night soliloquy of the flesh and spirit, glimpsing the sacred in the immediate and profane; "The Woodsman's Tale," a novelette told in poetic fragments that follows the mixed fate of an old man and a wolf through the four seasons; "Wind Cry," the urgent plea of a young Native American for a vision of the old life; and "Death Psalm," which explores the mythic final moment of our mortality amidst a kaleidoscopic swirl of world and being.