David Young Poet

Poem from June, 2010
Thoughts of Chairman Mao

1

Holding black whips
the rulers rode
in the blue hills.

But the peasants were everywhere and nowhere,
a soft avalanche, gathering
courage; in famines
we ate the mules, tasting vinegar,
lived among rocks above the passes,
and gradually became an army
red flags snapping in the wind
and I wrote of “a forest of rifles,”
and of heroes strolling home
against a smoky
sunset.

2

Wars merge like seasons;
sometimes over hot wine
the old campaigners try to remember
who we were fighting that winter
on this plateau, that plain,
and whether we won.

It blurs . . .
miles in boxcars
doors wedged open
miles across blue-shadowed snow.
Hungry evening.

Artillery at the river
bodies in the rice fields
a black truck on its side
burning . . .

At night we could hear the gibbons
calling each other up the valley.
When there was a rest or a vista
someone would write a poem.
It blends and blurs:
conferences melonseeds sabotage
dungfires treaties mosquitoes
my great red army on the march
blinking in the sunshine.

3

Now it is changed.
I am the giant in the pageant,
toothy, androgynous, quilted.

To the slow roll of drums
my effigy speaks to the people
of harvests, steelmills, stars.

In the puppetshows I battle
enemies of the state
sometimes with blows and curses
sometimes with love and flowers
while Marx pops up to hug me
and Lenin takes my arm.

I would have done it
with poems! Instead
I have come to be
a red book, a pumped-up myth,
from Long March to Big Swim
surfacing, always surfacing:
said to have gone
miles through golden water
wrestled the Yangtze and won,
water god, flower king, rice prince;

the current takes me on
and it is no small thing
riding these tides, wave upon
wave of love, smiling, unspeaking,
ten thousand miles of mountains and water,
a chanting race, a skin on history,

until the people rise and go,
dispersing me.

4

At the end I enter a small room.

Stalin is standing there alone
hands behind his back
gazing out the window.

We link arms. We merge.

And the rulers ride the blue hills
holding their black whips high.

........................from Boxcars (1974)

from Henry Vaughan

1.    Mountain Hare

I rise as the moon sets
and dawn beats up confusion.
Out on the mountain, walking,
I round a hedge in changing light
and meet a full-grown hare.

For a moment we stand and stare
fixed by the shock of each other.

He’s big as a goat. His ears twitch,
dew shines on his coat,
his wild walleye glitters
and then I fall inside it
and wake an hour or a minute later.

Poor Doctor Vaughan’s gone off again.
Maybe that’s what they say in the town.

2.    Glowworms and Strawberries

Follows me everywhere, this light,
and speaks to me in tongues.

It’s the light that strawberries give off
whether or not you cut them in half.

It’s the mute and muted light
earthworms admire in glowworms.

It’s a candle inside a bottle
inside another bottle,

the thirdhand light of the pond-moon
that dazzles us down to the backbone.

Light buds and sprouts like plants.
The body fills and shivers.

The spray on the blossoming trees
makes a solid wall of surf

across the hillside orchard
as the world spins slowly, wobbling.

Honeybees weave and dart
bright on their patterned errands.

Light slides through the broad river,
rising like trout in the pools

and finds itself in the music
that running water makes all night.

No matter how bad we’ve made the world,
killing for Charles or Cromwell,

it’s God, it’s made of God,
and will survive.

3.    Night-piece

I have walked past mountain outcrops
as daylight suddenly caught them,
showing the fire-glint inside.

Or sidewise, from a blacksmith’s forge,
in a dusk amid horses and men,
comes a shower of sparks that fires my eye.

Maybe the night is best.
A deep but dazzling darkness.

God coasts like a perfect boat
through coves and shoals of blackshine.

If you walk abroad you shiver
at the fat choir of stars,
and stare at the will-o’-the-wisps
dancing on swamps and meadows.

Dig your fingers into the turf
and hold for dear life to the planet.

I’ve called the night God’s knocking-time.
I’ve heard his still, soft call
as he hunts like a sharp-eyed owl.

And I swear I heard him whisper
“One of your poems made me weep,”
but he never said which one.

4.    Having lived through a war, I can hymn

Dumb and warm, the sheep stroll up
to nose me on the hillside
as I lie and stare at stars.

Milk runs cold in the sky,
water walks down the valley.
I hear the bark of a fox.

Odor of smoke and magnetic sex,
weird conversation of goats.
While the Bible shines, a lamp in a box,

the galaxy strokes its beard
and fondles its giant breasts,
pregnant and sure of its death.

All Wales is dreaming through me,
all England talks in its sleep.
It is thin silk, this ecstasy,

that rips itself into music
and drinks the tears that run
across its own wet face.

5.    The Weather Cock

Now here is a great joke:

the idea that the earth is finite
and we are mortal clay.

The Royal Society’s saying
this world is merely “matter.”

Even the clay knows better than that.

This is a world where soul-shine
blows through the clouds and trees,
where spirit bubbles in springs
and beats in lonely wells.

God’s bliss sings in the weeds
and shines in the path of slugs,
the tracks that lead nowhere,
straight as the spiral that runs
like a whelk shell or the wind
spinning the weathercock over my house,
light seeding itself each night
to spiral and sprout each day.

Come to my grave in Wales.
You’ll see a glistening yew
and, on an old stone wall,
you’ll find a snail with a perfect shell.

You may learn that God’s the light,
wind is the Holy Ghost,
and Christ’s the water cycle.

Mornings, there’s dew
up there on the weathercock.

The tin bird spins
and is lit by the sun..

from Night Thoughts and Henry Vaughan (1994)

Poem from April, 2010
from "The Light Show":

Today the April light is fizzing.
The wind is blowing chunks of it around:
it oils pine needles, runs up tree trunks,
and spreads in clumps across the grass.
The grackles struggle darkly to resist it,
but it glosses their necks with purple and green
and slicks their beaks. I too
feel misery start to slip away – against my grain
I’m hoisted up into this giant light-machine
and swept away. My silver pen
skates on the yellow paper, my fingernails glow,
my eyes glisten with tears and pleasure.
A huge willow has fallen in my yard,
victim of wind. But today the other trees
are holding themselves up like song into a sky
that is blue with a radiance no one could imagine..

from Earthshine (1988)

Poem from March, 2010
Whichever Stone You Pick Up

Whichever stone you pick up
you lay bare
those who need the stones’ protection:
naked,
they renew their intertwining.

Whichever tree you cut down
you fashion
the bedstead where souls
pile together once again
as if this eon were not
troubled
too.

Whichever word you speak
you thank
corruption.

Paul Celan, from From Threshold to Threshold
(forthcoming, Marick Press), translated by David Young

Poem from February, 2010
From 'Water Diary'

for several days the temperature stood so low
that at last we could walk on water    and we did
the creek creaked softly talking to itself
along the banks through harmless fissures
we brushed some snow aside and peered down through
but could see nothing not water not even ourselves
there was a strange sensation of wrinkles and darkness
we knocked on the stuff    for entrance    for luck
and an old man spoke from a book
“why can’t mind and matter
be more like wind and water?”
we looked up    snow was wobbling toward us
through miles and miles and miles of soundless air

from Boxcars (1973)

Poem from January, 2010
January 3, 2003

My father’s breathing chugs and puffs and catches,
a slow train slowing further, rattling in
to its last stop, a locked and shuttered station.

Ninety-nine years this pair of lungs, this heart,
have done their work without complaint.
Time now to let them stop and draw their wages.

The years slide down a chute and disappear;
as memories dissolve and vaporize,
the body simplifies to mottled matter,

and if the myths have got it right for once,
he turns to find a welcome somewhere else,
to touch my mother’s face and make her smile.

from Black Lab (2006)

Poem from December, 2009
Basho

Tonight, on the other side of the lake,
someone is walking with a lantern.

The changing light on the water
-- a blossom, a wasp, a blowfish --
calls me back from desolation
and makes me sigh with pleasure.

How can I be so foolish?


It’s true! All night
I listen to the rain
dripping in a basin . . .
in the morning I have a haiku.
So what!

All these years
and I think I know
just about nothing:
a close-grained man
standing in haze by the warm lake
hearing the slap of oars
and sobbing.


For weeks now, month, a year,
I have been living here at Unreal Hut
trying to decide what delight means
and what to do with my loneliness.

Wearing a black robe,
weaving around like a bat . . .


Fallen persimmon, shriveled chestnut,
I see myself too clearly.

A poet named for a banana tree!

Some lines of my own come back:
Year after year
on the monkey’s face –
a monkey mask.

I suppose I know what I want:
the calm of a wooden Buddha,
the state of mind of that monk
who forgot about the snow
even as he was sweeping it!

But I can’t run away from the world.
I sit and stare for hours at
a broken pot or a bruised peach.
An owl’s call makes me dance.

I remember a renga we wrote
that had some lines by Boncho:
somebody dusts the ashes
from a grilled sardine . . .
And that’s the poem! That sardine!
And when it is, I feel
it is the whole world too.

But what does it mean
and how can it save you?
When my hut burned down
I stood there thinking,
“Homeless, we’re all of us homeless . . .”

Or all my travels, just so much
slogging around in the mire,
and all those haiku,
squiggles of light in the water . . .


Poems change nothing, save nothing.

Should the pupil love
the blows of the teacher?

A storm is passing over.
Lightning, reflected in the lake,
scares me and leaves me speechless.

I can’t turn away from the world
but I can go lightly . . .

Along the way small things
may still distract me:
a crescent moon, a farmer
digging for wild potatoes,
red pepper pods, a snapped chrysanthemum . . .

Love the teacher, hate the blows.

Standing in mist by the shore,
nothing much on my mind . . .


Wearing a black robe,
weaving around like a bat –

or crossing a wide field
wearing a cypress hat!

from Foraging (1986)

Poem from November, 2009

Oh Salmon-Colored Edsel, Run Us Down

1
Always in autumn you cannot say what you mean.
Your eyes grow heavy, your head rolls.
You make a sound like an airplane
too high to see.

2
An insurance man is falling asleep at the wheel.
Death is all he wants:
shot down by drunken hunters,
stuffed and set up, a pumpkin man,
in some Slav’s yard.

And the housewife, in her sad scarf:
she wants to lie in the leaves
among blackening apples and walnuts,
she wants the leaves heaped up, frost-glazed,
she wants to be forgotten.

We are all heavy with this dark tug;
the fireman dreams himself in flames,
the teacher is dismembered by his class,
the farmer is crucified on his windmill.

We are sick of vicarious death; we want the real thing.
Our eyelids are carved of oak and our hands
shake when we try to use them.

3
Sunday morning at the Discount Center,
entrance to the kingdom of the dead.

They have a new machine here.
Put a quarter in this large white horse
and he’ll paw you to death.

4
Sometime in November it starts to snow,
softly, from gunblue clouds.

We light lamps early and build fires.
Blood rises in us again,
a naked dancer, slowly plunging
forward, head down,
shaking and singing.

from Sweating Out The Winter (1969)

Poem from October, 2009

Hearing You Read

for Stuart Friebert

that’s a persuasive voice that makes
bread rise, slices it up and serves it
walks through each room of the embarrassed house
undaunted by domestic jumps, slaps, tears,
stiff sleepers, old windows, eggs, mirrors,
stands on a hill and interrupts the wind
using strings that snarl and entangle
to engineer reunions of the dead, the dying
the loved who were always hated, lesbian cooks
who made you notice sidewalks, Czech refugees
who lied, pilots chewing their neckties, gloomy
fishermen, hunters sniffing their armpits, listen,
it’s a rich soup where even the stones float up
while someone who came of age the hard way, descended
from sects who capered naked in the snow says gently
eat these they’re good for you they’re dumplings
swallow darling and close your eyes the walls
are buckling slowly from time’s terrific
soft tornado and you’re the type who’d drop
two tranquilizers and then count the bricks
Stuart, the town is yours as well as this spilled
bucket of tennis balls don’t stay up late
calm down rise up from the floor read on!

........................from Boxcars (1974)

Poem from September, 2009

A Country Postcard

September here, a haze on things,
diamond mornings, dying corn.
We have green fields here, white-flecked,
we have blue fields here, chicory,
yellow fields, four kinds of goldenrod,
and a man in a white shirt
and a red face
a man made out of words
stands by the B & O tracks
listening for the express
that disappeared west
before the tracks
began to rust.

There’s a stillness
this morning, that the man
made out of words must walk through
listening
as he wades
in chicory, alfalfa,
wild carrot, goldenrod,
the nodding, growing
dew-decked, soon-to-die
words.

from Boxcars (1973)

Poem from August, 2009

Mother

There was nothing, I thought, still think,
you couldn’t do. Make pretty packages
that rustled with brown paper –
open the stuck jam jar, bandage wounds,
wire money, write condolence letters,
read out loud, speak five languages,
pull half-drowned dogs from the water,
and listen closely to long-winded stories.
But when the song began to end, you said:
I just can’t do this, sweetheart, I can’t do it.
And you meant dying. Struggling for hours
through the loose sand, searching for a handhold.
But you could do it after all, at last,
my dear one. And later, at the beach, I’ll find you.
Please, let me find you. You can do that, yes?

Translated from the Dutch of M. Vasalis,
by Fred Lessing and David Young

Poem from July, 2009

The Day Nabokov Died

    1
I looked up from my weeding
and saw a butterfly, coal-black,
floating across Plum Creek. Which facts
are laced with lies: it was another day,
it was a monarch – if it was black
it must have been incinerator fluff.

A black hinge, opening and shutting.

     2
Elsewhere the sunset lights
bonfires in hotel windows, gilds the lake,
picks out false embers where it can:
watch crystal, drinking glass, earring.
“Nabokov,” someone calls, “is dead . . .”
What would you give to be in, say, Fialta,
hearing the rhythms of a torpid coast?
Or on the porch at the Enchanted Hunters,
conversing in the shadows with Sirin?
Sneezes, lachrymose sighs. Chuckles and coughs.
When at a loss for words, try waving
one helpless hand before your face.

Walking the dog I saw a hawkmoth too,
big as two hands, opening and shutting.

      3
In the skyscraper across the lane
an aproned man sets up his easel
at the window opposite, and cocks his head.
What does he see? A dwarf
mixing a violet powder, a fat
landlady playing Patience, a little girl
brushing a velvet coat, in tears,
three people having sex. In short,
the world. Ourselves. Aren’t all of us
some form of Maxwell’s Demon,
particle sorters, systems
so self-enclosed they work too well to work?
Grandmaster, slip into your fiction like
Houdini diving through a pocket mirror.
Here’s wonder, but no grief. And even so,
you’d not have liked this poem. Wan child
in a sailor suit, man running by
waving a gauzy net, tall fencer, pedant,
hotelmensch, empty suit of clothes . . .

One exile more. One language still to learn.

from The Names Of A Hare In English (1979)

Poem from June, 2009

June 17, 2003

Dante has slipped and Virgil helps him up.
Or is it the other way around?
Exactly forty years today I married Chloe. . .
So many who were there have left this world
and still I wish I could converse with them,
break bread, drink wine, taste cheese and honey,
tell them I miss them, say to them that my world
seems to get bigger as it empties out.

A thundershower flails the backyard trees;
a house finch perches, seeking thistle seed.

Let’s rewrite Genesis, by God, admit
Eve must have given birth to Adam, then
he didn’t want to be beholden to her,
made up a sky-god who would punish her.

We search, in slumber, like a clumsy diver
feeling his way along the ocean bottom,
looking for wreckage, treasure, coral,
looking to surface into sunlight –
that glass of water, sitting on the table,
where once again the panther comes to drink . . .

Virgil fell down and Dante helped him up.
Or was that too the other way around?

from Black Lab (2006)

Poem from May, 2009

Kohoutek

In a broad field on a clear night you might stare at the sky quite uselessly, and with expanding dismay. I had the luck to encounter the comet on a gray morning when I was doing next to nothing in an upstairs room. I may have been restless and shaky, but my attention was steady as a trout. Outside, the plane trees began to stir. Then the mirror gave a small tremor. The comet was in the closet! Shaggy and silent. I glanced outside. The same pigeons were walking on the brown corrugated roof next to a skylight. But for a few moments, all the terrifying diffuseness – of matter, of winter light, of interest and love, of the Great Plains and the galaxies themselves – was just exactly bearable!

Poem from April, 2009

Root Vegetable Ghazal

The moon swings off in a bag like a market lettuce
And everyone gropes home by ant glint & beetle shine.

In the Hotel Potato, in waxy marble ballrooms,
The waltzers rustle to the croon of enzymes.

In the curved corridors of the onion palace,
The smell of mushrooms seeps from unlit closets.

Our city is littered with wormseed & forcemeat;
Mummies are hymning in our turnip-purple church.

Radishes cruise through the revenant storage warehouse.
The bones of a goose mark the way to an amphitheater.

Now we can scale the carrot, our tapering campanile,
To watch the platoons of gravel, the water-bead parade.

We with our thorn-wrapped hearts & ivory foreheads!
We with our mineral tunnels awash in mole-glow!

from The Planet on the Desk. (1991)

Poem from March, 2009

Poem for Wrists

Wrists! I want to
write you a poem you
whom nurses finger watches
circle razors open
handcuffs chill – you are
taken for granted wrists!
therefore assert yourselves
take charge of your
unruly friends the hands
keep them from triggers, off
necks give them a light
touch have them wave bye-bye
teach them to let
go at the right moment oh
wrists shy ankles of the arm
on whom farms flyrods
shovels whips and poems
so naturally depend.

from Boxcars (1973)

Poem from February, 2009

Blake's 'Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest' (1824)

The trees are full of life, streamlined and shapely;
their leaves are blobs and networks, rising water,
and everything is bluish-green, as if
this whole scene were submerged.

The two men, shapely too, have one strong contrast:
the younger poet's arms are at his sides,
palms out, a gesture of rejection.

Virgil, however, holds both arms aloft,
not just referring to the forest but
by being treelike, even more than Dante,
he's saying, Blake insists,
We are the forest!

It is not other, it is what we are!
The trees lean in to listen and agree.

from Black Lab (2006)

Poem from January, 2009

Skeleton

Death is so often portrayed
as a skeleton, with outsized hands
and a grin through iron teeth
as if a rake had smiled.
I had to grow this old, this wounded,
to understand that that is just more life,
stripped of all its temptations
when one has gone long enough and far enough,
deeper with every step
into the quicksand of existence:
it's life that dares to stand this way before me.
-- I laugh in response, he looks like a woman
who knows herself so married to her man
she no longer puts on her clothes for him
trusting triumphantly
that he does love her. -

Now I know too, why I always found something jolly
in that figure, that bare and shameless mouth,
the fragile cage of ribs, there where the heart
once hung and sang, a bird of light
caught in the tropics.
From all that was enticing about life
nothing's been saved but this transparency:
no song, no care, no love, no fire, no light.
Just this anonymous, iron, laughing face
and this cage, and these outsized hands.

...................Maria Vasalis, translated from the Dutch by
.............................................Alfred Lessing and David Young

Poem from December, 2008

December Fouth, 1974

Rainer Maria Rilke,
on this your ninety-ninth birthday
I make you the following presents:

a woodpecker's egg
roasted
in the flame of a small candle

an art nouveau jug
half full
from the wounds of your pretty
saints

the finger of a mummy
that will always point the way

a cloud of organ
sound a cloud
of orange and gold
butterflies
circling a pillar of salt

the nose of a pony that's
a trumpet a muscle a loaf

a poem by Tu Fu
that goes off like an old musket

the stunned
chain pickerel
I caught in a net this fall

oh the great big poppy of metaphor

the past and future for which you exchanged
my present your
present

I give it back, your present
that I keep finding and losing
red thread
angel's knuckle
smoke in the rafters crows

....................from The Names of a Hare in English (1979)

Poem from November, 2008

A Ghost, to One Alive

There you sit, in the midst of your heart’s rich tick,
your breath coming and going,
a lax and happy piston;

your eyes blink, your tongue slicks your lips,
your brain hums, gobbling oxygen.
Oh hot, unconscious life . . .

I know I am hard to imagine –
a smoke bag, a spindle of mist, fume of an old fear-pot –
but you are just the opposite:

you ruin this sweet hush, two times too real,
and I find I have to drift back
from your clicks, wheezes and smells,

your mask of hope over a hopeless gape,
one eye on the wagging clock, muffled
amazement, bundle of hungers, oven stuffed with yourself!

If you knew a bit more you might envy me,
moon-scalded as I am,
voodoo-hooded and vague as cheesecloth,

a simulacrum of solid old you,
the last billow from a cold, closed furnace,
a dimple, at best, in existence,

the bird call without the bird.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Foraging (1986)

Poem from October, 2008

Autumn Ghazal

Dressed all in cornshucks, I thread the marsh & meadow.
The rain comes widdershins. The brain's a sopping pumpkin.

Now meet Jack Bones, the tramp, & Hazel, the dusty witch;
His vinegar sizzle, her dripping crock of honey.

There's counterstress for walnut-crack. Light like a knife
Stuck in an apple. There's banging of cutlery and plates.

Blueface stares at Bloodyface. Oily hands tear bread.
Miles of high-tension wires. Smoke haze, asphalt scuffle.

What are those frosty weeds? What's this smashed cottage?
Who dumped the soup of life? Who cracked this cheval glass?

Coming up from the lead-mine, seeing the bean-curd clouds,
Hearing the bruise-owl call, shopping for winter candles . . .

Sleep condescends. Light rills across wet spiderwebs.
It takes eight days to wheel this bulkhead into place.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from The Planet on the Desk (1991)

Poem from September, 2008

The Portable Earth-Lamp

The planet on the desk, illuminated globe
we ordered for Bo’s birthday,
sits in its Lucite crescent, a medicine ball
of Rand McNally plastic. A brown cord
runs from the South Pole toward a socket.

It’s mostly a night-light for the boys,
and it blanches their dreaming faces,
a blue sphere patched with continents,
mottled by deeps and patterned currents,
its capital cities bright white dots.

Our models: they’re touching and absurd,
magical both for their truth and falsehood.

I like its shine at night. Moth-light.
I sleepwalk toward it, musing.
This globe’s a bible, a bubble of myth-
light, a blue eye, a double
bowl: empty of all but its bulb and clever skin,
full of whatever we choose to lodge there.

I haven’t been able to shake off all my grief,
my globe’s cold poles and arid wastes,
the weight of death, disease and history.
But see how the oceans heave and shine,
see how the clouds and mountains glisten!

We float through space. Days pass.
Sometimes we know we are part of a crystal
where light is sorted and stored,
sharing an iridescence
cobbled and million-featured.

Oh tiny beacon in the hurting dark.
Oh soft blue glow.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Earthshine

Poem from August, 2008

The Picture Says

1

That we all die, sometimes
when we are children.

That it would look like sleep
if flesh did not decay.

That we are marble, mottled,
that we are piebald clouds.

That we lie in the long grass,
peaceful, hair a little tangled,

grass like wires, spindles, rims,
grass like crisscross lifelines,

paths of the shooting stars,
arcs on the flecked night sky.

2

Sound of a backhoe, tractor-chug:
this old man is the pond-digger –

he stands by the water's edge
on his open palm a pond-snail . . .

he is humming, a kind of bee-speech,
while the child sleeps in the grass

the water a grainy mirror,
the light, the smoky lilies,

and the sky, filling slowly
with bruise-blue rainclouds.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from The Names of a Hare in English (1979)

Poem from July, 2008

July Morning Vision

Did nobody else at the funeral see
The great whips cracking in the air
The sweat flying off in droplets
The droplets shining like dew?

My birds, I want to speak to you today
About your other lives as galley slaves.
Your singing, in case you didn’t know it,
Comes from the chants you made, working together.

When a galley slave dies and becomes a bird,
The whips trill, the long boats roll and wallow,
We ship our oars and listen, listen, listen.
On the horizon, lightning lashes the sea.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from At The White Window (2000)

Poem from June, 2008

Four About Death

Naturally, no one has been more misrepresented. The large dark eyes, for instance, with their penetrating glance. In fact, they are blind. But if you put your own up close to them, you begin to glimpse the many things within: the lovers in their squirrel cage, the panel discussion, the feast of the green-gowned goats, the bull’s-eye lanterns strung through coastal villages. “So that is the sort of thing,” you muse, “that lies beyond.” The answer to that: not necessarily.

Rented the house next to mine. Aloof at first, seen occasionally clipping the hedge or putting out rabbit poison. Friendly waves as our carts passed in the grocery. Now and then limousines in the driveway, late nights, soft bell music. Thick red hair, golden beard, long fingers. When I realized he was spying on me, he confessed immediately, face ablaze. We discussed his loneliness and reached an understanding: weekly visit for tea and backgammon. We also exchange books, amidst disconcerting hints of greater intimacy to come. Something in that firm handshake makes me think I was wrong to take pity on him.

Peyote, no hot water, a relaxed attitude about magic – the Native Americans got to know her quite well. An Indian child could go sit with Death and chat. Such conversations tended to be dominated by her opinions. She considered the Cheyennes “autograph-seekers.” She called the Aztecs a name that translates roughly as “The Heavies.” About the Pawnees: “It’s ridiculous, all those stories about Beaver Woman this and Buzzard Man that.” As for the Navajos, she resented their interest in her relation to darkness, mosquitoes, intoxication, and travel. Her comments suggest a gruff affection. Which was reciprocated. Often. And with considerable taste.

I get your instructions in a letter. A small plane drops me at an airfield in the Andes. I stand by a rusting hangar, watching it climb out of sight. No one’s around. Farther up the mountain animals I have never seen are grazing. Higher still, a few clouds, resting against rocks. You do not arrive when I do. I must live in a hut for an undetermined space of time. Now and then I walk down to the village, carrying a basket for food and a jug for wine, but such things interest me less and less. Night storms light the mountains with blue flashes and send gusts of wind and rain that flatten the meadows. The morning of your arrival, I see a hare raised up, watching me. I do not know if you will come down the mountain or, more slowly, from below. All I know is that I will go out to meet you. My soul will be in my mouth.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Work Lights (1977)

Poem from May, 2008

Bonuses

The wasp’s
zigzag journey
up the pane
while I read
down one
page

Mushrooms as ghosts:
did you think rot
could fruit this way?
Or taste like this?
Or give you visions?

The grackle walks
like a drum major
then leaps straight up
and opens into
a lady’s black silk fan.

Mushroom architecture:
Art Deco airport towers,
Destroying Angels pure as mosques,
geodesic puffballs, shagged pagodas,
morels by Gaudi . . .

Because of the way
the windows join
their images I see
two robins now –
one solid on the lawn,
the other, next to him,
a see-through ghost.

The solitary double, fierce for worms,
struts unaware of what’s not there.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Foraging (1986)

Poem from April, 2008

The Self: A Sonnet Sequence

1
If we are what we see, hear, handle,
then I am London now: rainlight and chimneypots,
shuddering buses, streaky bacon flatblocks,
rooks in a queue. Reading your novel, I was a girl

who took up living in a barn, Sense-pestered,
trailing itself around the world,
the self is now and then complete as it looks in
to mingle with an afternoon, a page, a person . . .

In the Siberian frozen tombs they found
wool socks, expressive faces, rugs, fresh leather,
a chieftain’s arm still glowing with tattoos:

what the self freezes, what the self digs up –
what do you want to call it, kid?
Weather. A city on a page. A mirror.

2
Self as imperialist, pushing out his borders?
Oh, the ego rides in armor, bellows threats,
but his helmet’s a pocked kettle, he’ll turn tail
as soon as he sees the torches of the future,

he’s far less real than, say, his horse’s shoulder.
The anarchists he hired are dismantling
what’s left of his soft palace, heaving chunks
into the soft and unbecoming river.

A candle: what it means to do is vanish,
Brightly. The self: what it means to do
is make a candle. Something of that kind,

and the object – horseshoe, cabbage, poem –
is what the self just hoped to run together to
and fill: a cup of anonymity.

3
Well, no, not run together. Scatter: smoke
in its eloquent hoods and cowls. Clouds,
their race and rain. We’re swarms of funny matter
(ice, rust, grasses, moonsparks, puff-paste)

longing and fearing to disperse. “Can’t get away
from you-know-who” (scratched on a mirror), but the eye
sees way beyond the eye, and the mooncalf mind
sits on its shelf and flies great kites.

“After the dancers have left
and the grand ballroom is empty,
the old beekeeper brings

a rustling and humming box;
and the band begins to play again,
but you’ve never heard the music.”

4
My young self comes to see me, fresh and friendly.
He is from 1957, and anxious to get back.
I think he is just polite about my acting
as though we had lots in common. Stands in the doorway,

charming but rushed. I’m amazed
that I like him so much, like him at all,
he has such an air of self-discovery,
as if one day to the next he knows himself

(first love, acting, superficial poems),
a life he thinks I’m merely interrupting.
I live inside his dream, he inside mine,

and we back away from each other, smiling,
a couple of meadows, a couple of knives,
affection brimming between us as we go.

5
Is a pebble. Is a bubble. Drags its little sled
through empty salt flats under a cobalt sky
of nailed-up stars. Is a lamb with real sharp teeth,
a tongue waltzing in a moonlit clearing. Is

a donkey, leaning against a mulberry tree
in which the silkworms spin their mysteries;
hugs itself, hugs itself and cries,
a horn full of sparks, a shadow at a keyhole.

The critic wanted to enter the very brush stroke,
then find the brush, then climb the painter’s arm,
muscle and vein and nerve to mind and heart:

instead he stumbled and then he was falling forever
through meaningless words that were falling too
in exactly the opposite direction.

6
Has its parents strapped on like backpacks,
grandparents in a suitcase; its orders are
to move the grand piano over a mountain
without upsetting the buckets of milk for its children.

The house is sheared open by the wrecking ball
and there is the bathroom, flashing its mirror,
the wallpaper, losing track of its pattern,
the chest of drawers where father kept his condoms.

Tear rolling down the hill of the corpse’s
Cheek. Big tear that rolls off the stiff blue chin.
Things left behind, trashbin and junkyard.

Rain won’t be different from skin.
Eye won’t be different from view.
Smoke will take root and every flower float.

7
Hyde, this is Jekyll: no more rages,
no more rapes and stranglings. I leave this flat
only for necessary shopping.
On the horizon, the orphanage burns.

Evelyn Waugh, timid of ridicule,
built up a carapace so thick
he could hardly move inside it – except to write
painful, hilarious novels, ridiculing the world.

The daylight brightens, dims and brightens.
Late March. Atoms of nostalgia,
flakes of essential self. Crusoe on his beach

pondering a footprint. Still March. Outside
the blown rain writes nonsense on the windows,
the pear tree strains against its ivory buds.

8
One of those houses where the eyes of portraits move
and suits of armor mutter by the stairs.
But this was worse. The chairs had body-heat
and every sink was specked with blood.

I swept from room to room, my cape
billowing out behind. Sat by the fire
poking the panting coals. Hid beneath a bed
and listened to them screwing in the attic.

Think of a liquid. Dog slobber. Cattle drool.
Dipped up in a leaf-cup from a spring. It’s true,
anything other than human could comfort me now

like that French poet who could put his face
against a hanging side of beef
and still his fear.

9
Goodbye to the night sky, the Milky Way
a bone-seam on a cranium, vein in a cave.
Now dawn is a rooster, noon a pheasant
crossing the road. I drive. Land’s End, Tintagel,

the landscape fills me slowly, like a sail.
A daylight display, a wind off the Atlantic,
ego shadows sailing across pieced fields,
a herd of clouds without a shepherd.

Sometimes the world will fit you like a sweater
and you think ingenuity and fortitude
can see you through, your recipe and axis.

I have to say this clumsily; at best,
the image trembles in its instant, star
in a pail of water carried through a glade.

10
In Voronezh did Mandelstam
sing of his death the winter I was born
in Davenport, in Iowa, all mother’s milk and love
against his sour tea and fear. The contrast

makes me wince. I want . . . to be a goldfinch too?
No, and I’m not the point. Nor Mandelstam. We’re both
exhibits of the self, the flesh made word,
singing its own confusion and delight:

all this takes place despite the big world’s Stalins.
I write this in The Royal Mail, in Islington.
“Hullo, Stanley,” says the barmaid. Pool balls click,

the jukebox throbs. We bob on currents,
taking the world as best we can, each planet
cruising its dawns and dusks around the sun.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .England. (January-May, 1979)

Poem from March, 2008

A Lowercase Alphabet

a. . . . . . . . . .snail going up the wall

b. . . . . . . . . .hang up the little dipper

c. . . . . . . . . .mouth, moon, riverbed

d. . . . . . . . . the dipper in the mirror

e. . . . . . . . . .tiny eye of the whale

f. . . . . . . . . .oil well, skate, old pistol

g. . . . . . . . . what did you do to your glasses?

h. . . . . . . . . a chimney for every hut

i. . . . . . . . . .the levitation of the spot

j. . . . . . . . . .landscape with fishhook and planet

k. . . . . . . . . where three roads almost meet

l. . . . . . . . . .romance of the periscope

m. . . . . . . . .comb from the iron age

n. . . . . . . . . the hut that lost its chimney

o. . . . . . . . . .simplification of the blood

p. . . . . . . . . .the dipper dead and buried

q. . . . . . . . . .its mirror buried with it

r. . . . . . . . . .geyser that goes off crooked

s. . . . . . . . . .little black love seat

t. . . . . . . . . .the portable cross

u. . . . . . . . . cross section of a trough

v. . . . . . . . . .the hawk above the valley

w. . . . . . . . . a graph for winter, pigsfoot

x. . . . . . . . . .dancer, hourglass, black suspenders

y. . . . . . . . . .the root begins to sprout

z. . . . . . . . . .path of the rabbit

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from The Names Of A Hare In English (1979)

Poem from February, 2008

Chopping Garlic

The bulb, an oriental palace
shrouded in gray and lavender paper,
splits open into a heap
of wedge-shaped packets housing
horns, fangs, monster toenails
all of a pungent ivory -- I
could string them into a necklace
but I smash them flat instead,
loving the crunch, brushing away
all the confetti – clouds
of odor bloom around me now
as I chop, this way and that,
with my half-moon blade
in the scooped wood
that will never completely lose
the fragrance that oils it, smears
my fingers, wants to be in
the pores of my skin forever . . .
trumpets and cymbals blare
as I dump the grainy mess
into the pan, oh, holy to the nose
are the incense and sizzle that summon
folks from all parts of the house
to ask about dinner, sniffing,
while up in one end of the sky
a crescent moon hangs crazily
a glowing clove,
a dangerous fragrance
filling the very corners
of some god's smiling mouth.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from At The White Window (2000)

Poem from January, 2008

A Calendar: The Beautiful Names of the Months

........ ..January
On this yearly journey two
faces are better – a weary
woman, a wary man.

........ ..February
Where the earth goes
to run a fever. The care’s good.
Herbs brew. The rooms are airy.

........ ..March
Bridge curving over a swamp.
A bruise that smarts, the long
patience of an army.

........ ..April
Neither grape nor apple.
Any monkey, a pearly sprig,
a prism. Flute notes.

........ ...May
The arch opens. Crowds.
Goats, babies, vowels and
the wind, permitting anything.

........ ..June
A jury rises.
The moons of Jupiter
set. Bugs, berries, prairie grass.

........ ..July
Jewelers snooze on the grass,
one eye open for the tall
constellation-poppies.

........ .. August
Clearing your throat of dust.
Wading in lagoons . . . algae,
hot bursts of wind.

........ ..September
Lives away from his brothers,
gentle-tempered, a little solemn.
Bears pests, eats peas and beets.

........ ..October
Cold roots and a fresh-caught owl
rocked on a cot.
An orange boot.

........ ..November
Toothache and memory.
Nine women. Overdressed beavers.
No new members.

........ ..December
Something decent, easy.
Frozen meekness. Wax. A good
end, an ember, then ten of them.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Box Cars (1974)

Poem from December, 2007

The Poem of the Cold

Admit you tried to make it pretty. Start again. Talk about the huge
nails going in, the serene blows of the hammer. Flocks migrate at
great cost, animals crawl painfully into burrows. A starving man
chews on a bird’snest, cursing. It may be true that wonderful things
go on – a polished haw swinging on a tree in the oxlike wind, an old
woman splitting wood next to a sand-colored barn – but you must
avoid these. For you are the cold’sthin voice, that thickens everything
else As you sing, warm things ball up, shrivel, stiffen. Hands become
mittens, heads become hoods. Shadows lose their outlines, gates lock,
waterfalls hang silent as their own bad portraits. And gradually, as you
shiver and wince, your poem will grind to its own slow close, like the
works of a twenty-five pound clock, freezing beside the overturned
dog sled, the scattered supplies, the man whose face froze around his
tears and beard, the five dead huskies.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Work Lights (1974)

Poem from November, 2007

At the Back of the Year in a High Wind

winter

the sun crawls through a sewer pipe

the moon that silver truck
drives off through shaking trees

little shrubs that edge potato fields
are wringing their hands saying We
were not meant to be adventurous

and here comes a prairie chicken
tumbling over and over
_________________she has come
a long way
________from the west

and is going a long way

to the conventions of the clouds
the master classes of the snow

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Boxcar (1973)

Poem from October, 2007

October’s Stem and Head-Piece

I’ve carved this pumpkin with a moonslice grin
and star-shaped eyeholes. I want him to go rolling
among the reaches of the universe, hung glitter,

and let the spirits spinning on themselves
among the ice, the burning dust, the gulfs,
the inky gasses, streaky bursts of starlight,

know how this blue sky and this honey locust
are just what the great gods would have booked
if they could order up a world of form and color.

I want him hinting of the wells of being here
quenching the greatest thirsts, those wells we taint
when we forget we need to sing the death-chant

that wraps me now, as I flush seeds and pulp and strings
into the rippling creek, then hurl the cerebellum
into the brush where nobody will find it.

All night the sallow face smiles at clouds,
licking the cream, winking at the wolves,
as pinprick after pinprick fills the sky.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from At the White Window (2000)

Poem from September, 2007

Poem About Hopping

Rabbits in Alabama hop
into clumps of Syrian grass
to nibble the stalks, thinking of
sorghum, hardly noticing autumn.

Along the Great Divide the bighorn
sheep hop casually from rock to
rock in the wind and glare, seriously
considering leaping silver rivers, as

salmon in crazy waters jump
upstream for love – oh it’s
a nervous country. When you
walk through stubble, the hub

of a wheel with grasshopper
spokes, or sit over bowls of excited
cereal, what can you say to your heart
but, Down sir, down sir, down?

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Sweating Out the Winter (1969)

Poem from August, 2007

Putting My Father's Ashes in the Cemetery
at Springville Iowa

August 7, 2003

My brother and my sister shade their eyes
against the noonday glare. My cousins stroll
among the graves. These Grant Wood hills
rich now with corn and soybeans,
seem to be just the place to set
this marble shoebox
deep in the earth, next to my mother’s,
this earth that’s full of relatives:
grandparents, uncles, aunts, the infants too,
some that lived long enough for names, some not,
each generation giving ground to others,
hidden and peaceful, like the family farms
down at the end of narrow shaded lanes
where tractors doze and trees stand tall and green
dreaming the summer into autumn.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Black Lab (2006)

Poem from July, 2007

Vermont Summer: Three Snapshots, One Letter

Imaginary Polaroid

In this picture I am standing in a meadow,
holding a list of fifty-one wildflowers.
It is Vermont, midsummer, clear morning
all the way to the Adirondacks.
I am, as usual, lost. But happy,
shaggy with dew. Waving my list.
The wind that blows the clouds across these mountains
has blown my ghosts away, and the sun
has flooded my world to the blinding-point.
There’s nothing to do till galaxy-rise
but name and gather the wildflowers.
This is called “pearly everlasting.”
And this one is arrow-leaved tear-thumb!
Hawkweed, stitchwort, dogbane, meadow-rue . . .
The dark comes on, the fireflies weave around me,
pearl and phosphor in the windy dark,
and still I am clutching my list,
saying “hop clover, fireweed, cinquefoil,”
as the Milky Way spreads like an anchor overhead.

Robert Frost’s Cabin

He perched up here at the lip of the woods
summer after summer. Grafted his apple trees
into a state of confusion. Came down
two or three times a season to be lionized.
Mesmerized visitors with talk,
or hid from them. Or both.

Charles and I look in his windows.
There’s his famous chair.
The place is tiny, but the view is good.
We shake our heads at his solitude.
Couldn’t he have the kind of friendship
that brought us here together?

How can we keep from becoming such molluscs?
Easy, says Charles. Don’t live that long.

Hay-Henge

After the meadow was mowed and before
the bales were gathered, the students
erected a midget Stonehenge in the moonlight.
It stood there all the next day:
real from a distance, and up close
sweet-smelling and short-lived.

Off and on I’ve been pondering models:
I think they are all we have.
Snapshots, cabins, lists. Metonymies.
At Lascaux they’ve opened
a replica of the caves. I shall get
Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream . . .
The sun goes down beyond Hay-Henge;
clouds and mountains mix in the distance.

Letter to Chloe

Since you left, we’ve had
wild blackberries, northern lights,
and one grand thunderstorm.
Again, these mountains have been
Chinese with their graduated mist.
Tonight it’s clear and we hope to see
a meteor shower. I’m teaching Vaughan,
who tried to show us another world
with images of light, and knew
he needed dark to make the light more real.

I shake my head, still lost.
I’m lucky if I find a berry,
name a flower, see a shooting star.
You and I cried a little at the airport:
each parting’s a model for something bigger.
But I don’t think the models mean much.
We try to take them as they come:
A trefoil in the hand, a meteor trail
crossing the retina, a black and glinting
tart-sweet berry in the mouth.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Foraging, (1986)

Poem from June, 2007:

from "Four Songs on a Bone Flute"

1. Summer

This sprig of basil
out of my garden
teaches each sense –

green glow to light me
the way through the world
even the underworld

fragrance of summer
rough coasts and hills
baked in the sun

touched, it releases
even more odor
clouding my hands

flavor will hurry
all over my tongue
bursting horizons

and then there’s the song
even more rousing
for making a silence.

..................from At the White Window (2000)

Poem from May, 2007:

Walking Home on an Early Spring
.....Evening

Every microcosm needs its crow,
something to hang around and comment,
scavenge,
alight on highest branches.

Who hasn’t seen the gnats,
the pollen grains that coat the windshield ---
who hasn’t heard the tree frogs?

In the long march that takes us all our life,
in and out of sleep, sun up, sun gone,
our aging back and forth, smiling and puzzled,
there come these times: you stop and look,

and fix on something unremarkable,
a parking lot or just a patch of sumac,
but it will flare and resonate

and you’ll feel part of it for once,
you’ll be a goldfinch hanging on a feeder,
you’ll be a river system all in silver
etched on a frosty driveway, you’ll

say "Folks, I think I made it this time,
I think this is my song." The crow lifts up,
its feathers shine and whisper,

its round black eye surveys indifferently
the world we’ve made
and then the one we haven’t.

Poem from April, 2007:

Easter Ghazal

Dreaming the dead back to life: pleasure & gentleness.
Grateful for this miracle, this bubble of reunion.

Harps bounce & hum there in the firmament.
The fundament. Coining likenesses. Did you say something?

Bricks crumb, bones powder: this helps make potting soil.
Clay reproduces! Ploughs heal the fields they wound.

Today we trim the rabbit’s nails upside the hutch,
Nail up the bat-house, baptize each other with the hose.

I’m flame. A flag going up a flagpole. I’m
The beetle dropped by the mother bird, picked up again.

The heart’s a tomato with lips. Woodpeckers tap hosannas.
Sleepy blips & explosions fleck love’s radar screen.

Something rises. Something drops. Elastic days!
Tonight this window’s black with possibility.

Poem from March, 2007

from “Water Diary” (Boxcars, 1973)

walking the tracks in early March
thinking where would I store a handcar
we ponder the fast clouds my son and I
and stare at winter’s house 1 look down:
smashed grass gravel in a pool rainrings
wet rust on the tracks the creek rushing
no trains today no setting out arriving
the wind bucketing off through the trees
and sunset a skin of ice on each red puddle

Poem from February, 2007:

Section 10 of “Dancing in the Dark,”
from “Poem in Three Parts,” Earthshine

And yesterday a red-tailed hawk
killed and ate a mourning dove
in the middle of a snowstorm
in our back yard. For five minutes
that made a violent, bobbing center
for everything else in sight:
the swirl of flakes, the pine boughs humped with snow,
the smaller birds who fled,
our curious eyes and breath.
And then the center shifted.

Any still point we choose
is relative to observation;
the planet rolled ahead, dragging
its dead and gorgeous moon,
great storms shot up on the sun,
whole galaxies stood by and gleamed,
and maybe an owl in a hollow tree
two hundred yards away from us
swiveled his head and blinked,
hearing the little death.
The hawk rose up, his tail a flare of rust,
and a sprinkle of torn feathers
began to blow across the blood-patched snow
till we could see no more.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .February, 1985

Poem from January, 2007

Two New Year's Poems by DU FU
0oo0 o00(from a manuscript in progress)

1. What a Night!

What a night this is --
old year out, new one in

long watch, bright candles
none of their light wasted

here in the local inn
what pastimes do we have?

we can throw dice
to keep ourselves amused

one man leans across the table
begging for five to come up

another rolls up his sleeves
before he throws and loses

all the politicians
roll dice too, and lose

but an accidental meeting
might just bring good fortune

don’t laugh at that!
remember that nonentity, Liu I,

penniless
and willing to risk millions!

ooooooooooooooooooooooooDated 746

2. New Year's Eve at TU WEI's

It’s best to watch the year depart
with members of the family

singing songs
drinking pepper wine

nervous, out in the stables,
the horses make a racket

the crows are rousted from the trees
by all the torches and lanterns

tomorrow I leave
my fortieth year

my life has started to race
downhill, toward its evening

and what is the use of caution
the value of restraint?

better to put my cares aside
and just get drunk.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooDated 751

Poem from December, 2006

Christmas: Ohio and Capolongo

Like a soft doll the raptured angel lolls
above the dusty crèche; lights flicker
in all the downtown trees, while carols
crisscross the air from boxy speakers.

I’m in two places now: my country,
where the Nativity is clumsy but familiar,
and that inept museum, east of Nervi,
which shows me crèches of another order:

elaborate pageants, carefully arranged,
all lace and straw and flat-out piety,
the underside of what made art both strange
and wonderful, that Catholic sense of deity.

We’re never going to get God right. But we
learn to love all our failures on the way.

Peom from November, 2006

Tree Time-Trips

.....1
My shoes crush acorns.
I’m thirty-nine I’m seven.
Far down the yard
my father and a neighbor
sail horseshoes through the air.

The clank and settle.

And the past I thought would dwindle
arcs back to me, a hoop.

The men wipe their necks,
the boy walks round the oak:
sometimes our lives rust gently,
a long-handled shovel, leaned
against a sun-warmed wall.

.....2
Fourteen, I perch on the wicker seat
in a nimbus of misery, love’s shrimp,
hearing the streetcar’s crackle and hiss
as the drugstore turns on its corner.

And what was real? The whipped sparks,
the glove puppets, bobbing, the pocket dreams,
this poem-to-be, my father’s wharf
of set belief, the wicker and shellac?

Learning to be imperfect –
that’s erudition!
Like coolies in flooded fields,
we wade on our own reflections.

.....3
November bleach and brownout. Acid sky,
falsetto sunlight, wire and fluff of weeds, pods,
bone and paper grass-clumps. The dog bounds off,
stitching the field with her nose. Hound city.

It’s thirteen years. Different dog, same field,
and double grief: dull for the slumped president,
stake-sharp for my friend’s ripped heart – faint
night-cries in the mansions where we lived.

But the bullet grooves are gone, the first dog’s dead,
and here is the field, seedy and full of sameness.
Speech fails, years wrinkle. Dream covers dream

that covered dream. My head starts up a jazz
I never could concoct. I have to grin. On the cold pond
the tinsmith wind is whistling at his work.

Poem form October, 2006

October Couplets

1
Again the cold: shot bolt, blue shackle,
oxalic acid, bleaching a rubber cuff,

a cow-eyed giantess, burning roots and brush,
the streak and smash of clouds, loud settling jays,

crows roosting closer – my older-by-one-year bones
have their own dull hum, a blues: it’s all plod,

but they want to go on, above timberline,
to boulders, florets, ozone, then go free

in the old mill that the wind and the frost run
all day all night under the gauze and gaze of stars.

2
Somewhere between sperm cell and clam shell
this space cruiser takes me places I’d rather

stay clear of: a planet all graveyard, mowed,
graveled and paved, bride-light and parson-shade,

or a milkweed, bitter, about to burst, or a dropped
acorn even a squirrel didn’t want, browning to black,

and I have to learn to relax with it all, to sing
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I,” though the lily

is sticky and choking, bees don’t suck, and the sting
is a greeting you never recover from.

3
“Steam of consciousness,” a student’s fluke,
makes me see a lake, linen-white at evening,

some amnesia-happy poet all curled up
sucking a rock at its black bottom;

oblivion tempts everyone, but I
would miss too much – whales and ticks,

the weather’s subtle bustle, blue crab clouds,
my kite rising, paper and sticks, a silver ember,

while the poem’s ghost waits by the empty band shell,
does a little tango, taps out its own last line.

4
But this fall rain, somehow both thread and button,
sewing itself to the malachite grass,

beading the clubs and brushes of the spruce –
all day I have sat as if gazing over water,

wind feathering the reservoir, stupid as a church,
and thought of summer: all those burst horizons,

mineral cities, rosy meat, clean seas and shaggy islands,
the wine cork popping in the grape arbor,

these things seem better and clearer and than gods just now,
raspberries hung like lamps among their brambles.

5
These leaves, these paper cutouts drifting my yard,
stars, fish, mitten, saddles: the badges and epaulets

of emptiness – last night in my dream
I was the killer, the guard who failed to stop him,

and the child who froze and was spared. Nothing lasts,
sang the crowd, and I answered, It sure does;

Is nothing sacred, roared the statesman – I do
believe it is, said I . . . I wake and shave,

still full of my dreamflood – oh skim milk sky,
oh brown star curling in my hand . . .

Poem from September, 2006

Mesa Verde

1.
Drive up with me.

Show the way, magpie, across the invisible bridge.

Old ghosts, be near,
but not too near.

September, early morning, not a trace of haze.
Rabbit brush glows like sulphur
and the mesa dozes in sunlight.
The corner-eye specter on the trail
is a rock or a piñon stump
or a tourist aiming a camera.
Sun-shimmer and squint. The gorges
lie silent and waterless
like dreams of river valleys
that rivers never made.

Climb into me, Anasazi,
take my tongue and language,
tell how you came to farm the corn,
hoarding the snow-melt, learned
to be weavers, potters, masons
in the huge American daylight,
gathering pine nuts, hunting mule deer,
crushed juniper berries with water,
mixed them in cornmeal for our thick blue bread
-- what was our word for bread? --
and praised the gods, hunched in our smoky kivas,
singing over the soul-hole
the mystery of our birth
when first a man crawled out
from warm dark to open air.

We farmed till the droughts got worse,
the corn and squash and beans
shriveled and died, the game thinned out,
and we moved down to live
in the scoops and pockets of cliffs
where water seeped and food could be hoarded,
two hundred feet below the dizzy rim,
nine hundred feet above the canyon floor
perching like squirrels and jays
because the gods decided
(what were the names of the gods?)
that life had been too easy,
that snows should stop and water shrink
and we too nest against the canyon walls
mindful of hardship.

2.
Silence again. Silence in Spruce Tree Lodge,
at Hovenweep, Chaco Canyon,
stone and sunlight resting against each other
and no ghosts coming to converse
at nightfall when the stars spring out
and we stand on the rimrock, staring up
at the Bear and the hunters chasing him,
at the stocky women, grinding corn
among dogs, turkeys, children,
while smoke floats from the kiva
and snow-fluff crowns the sagebrush.

Silence, solstice to equinox.
Empty granaries, cold firepits, dry cisterns.
The sun walks through the canyon,
peering under the sandstone overhangs,
and the wind walks too, wearing pine-smell.
Skull-jar and serviceberry,
sipapu and alcove,
a ghostly sea of buffalo
tossing on the plains below.

And the light slips off
among the rifted mesas,
the dead are wrapped in turkey-feather blankets,
rabbit-fur robes, yucca mats,
and buried in the trashpiles,
while the living move south or west
in search of food and water
leaving it all to the sun and wind and stars
who lived here first.

The night is dreamless,
a star-chart, a crescent wrench moon,
and the air hangs quietly
a sea whose bottom you walk
looking up through the empty miles,
the rocks around you liked turned backs.

The sun cracks earth, the frost splits rocks.
What’s history if it falls away,
if the brick-colored woman
milling corn in the courtyard
isn’t kin to us, can’t leave this landscape,
neighbor horizon and brother canyon wren,
toehold and rampart,
the old river of belief
that pounds through empty gullies
like sunlight and moonlight
leaving them undisturbed?

Touch me. Moisten my mouth,
dazzle my eyes. Link me for a moment to the life
that wore on gently here
and left these ruins to the sun.

3.
In the swept museum,
smaller than hummingbirds
these people kneel and climb in little models
weaving their tiny baskets
hoarding their dollhouse ears of corn.

And who doesn’t crouch below some diorama
while sunlight moves across a mesa.
hearing the call of raven,
glimpsing the Steller’s jay?

I write this on an overhang, a porch,
against a California canyon
that runs down to the sea;
across the way the houses perch and nestle
among the live oaks, palms, and avocado trees.
Hummingbirds float through my eucalyptus
like strange little fingers, or gods,
while the raven’s shadow travels the rough slope,
wrinkling and stretching,
recollection of another life.

The hummingbird comes to rest, midair,
and the mind meshes with other minds,
lost patterns of thought that hang
over the mesa, across the hillsides,
in pools of light and shadow,
and make us bow in thought or prayer,
silence or speech,
while the sun that walked this canyon
when it was brown and empty
and will have it so again
carries the day away
through dry and shining air.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .Laguna Beach. September, 1981

Back to Poem for July, 2010
from A Painting of a Falcon

Poem from June, 2010
from Thoughts of Chairman Mao

Poem from May, 2010
from Henry Vaughan

Poem from April, 2010
from The Light Show

Poem from March, 2010
Whichever Stene You Pick Up

Poem from February, 2010
from 'Water Diary'

Poem from January, 2010
January 3, 2003

Poem from December, 2009
Basho

Poem from November, 2009
Oh Salmon-Colored Edsel, Run Us Down

Poem from October, 2009
Hearing You Road

Poem from September, 2009
A Country Postcard