Tuesday, July 19, 2016

The way it is




Remembering the hummingbird’s visit
in the last of yesterday’s light

and its return of early morning surprises
of hovers and darts, then again gone.

And I wonder of chill, of slow moving nectar, 
of flattened light, of discouragement

and of fact; and I wonder of lingering
and of rest, of the delicate, and the brusk.

And I wonder if they are really
very different from us.



**


This age ? 

Well, it’s like waking from the dream
   of a younger man,
       
       waking almost fully rested 
          in dappled sunlight…


**


Forty-two—

tomorrow is the middle one’s birthday, 
brought home to an acre plot
in rural New Hampshire
to the outstretched arms
of an older brother
still right there 
within reach.


**


Polly Dome Lakes, North Yosemite

Taking Murphy’s Creek Trail
up from Tenaya Lake, we camp 
on a rise in a crook of the creek 

looking down at the rush and up 
through the trees to the star-studded sky 
to breathe in the breath of heaven.


**


McGee’s Lake

We are miserable with mosquitoes—the smoke
won’t choke’m, the chill doesn’t still’m,
repellant not repel’m—miserable

with mosquitoes in the Sierra, 
talking into the night
of the next trip.


**


Hiking into the Tuolumne River canyon

along that string of breathtaking drops 
from Tuolumne Falls to White Cascades, to California and La Conte,
and finally to Water Wheel—falls and rapids, stretches and pockets,
roars and reaches and runs, and those ponds, swirls and suddenness 
of bedrock quiet—bare and domed and scraped and ripped, cracked 
and felled into boulders—rocks as big as houses—and dreams
even bigger…thank you, John Muir. 


**


La Conte Falls #1

wind blows needles
and branches that bunch 
the surface of boulders

where grasses grow
in accrued debris 
of disinterested care

where cliffs give way 
to whatever offers
of sun and rain

where ancient chants 
are yet one more 
untraceable beauty…


**


La Conte Falls #2

Just as darkness lifts, I realize
the falls surround us on three sides,

and though the trees don’t betray,
the ground admits 

of a resonance, of a flow 
and a pulse,

the dominant, yet simple rejoinder
of unremitting presence,

the who of decisions here.


**


Did you know that dust in the air 
feeds lichen that feeds on rock 
that turns to dirt that feeds plants 
that feed the air we breathe—

and how, when my boot treads
that felt-like cushion
that covers a granite slab,
how my heart skips a beat?


**


Scientists may come to measure, 
mystics and poets for symbol and light,

but the common ground in high country
is always wonder and awe.


**


A purplish hue hovers the interlude 
between the dropping sun 
and dark’s arrival; river 
continuing its talk, mosquito 
beginning its inquiry, 
we make appropriate moves
to secure the screens on the tent.


**


Everything figures in, every gesture
counts—the saints among us

know this one thing,

and move on it 
every time.


**


“If you don’t remember, it doesn’t belong.”
                                            —Nanao Sakaki—


The bristled purple blossom of the lodgepole pine
pre-figures the coming cone—a purplish-green, 
pineapple-like cylinder at first, it dries 

to outside brown that pries the brittle petals 
to gentle curls that reveal, for awhile, 
smooth purple undersides 

that also dry over time, to brown, to become 
simply “pine cones.” 

These mountain trees, the only two-needle pine 
in the high Sierra, are sometimes called tamarack, 
“a deciduous conifer of tough wood and bright foliage.”


**


“nembutsu,” the Buddhist practice of remembrance
through spoken word, utterance, chant—not so much
that we speak, but that the world speaks in and through

and as us, and all other—“a primal poem”—the open-hearted
energies of world at work the way it is, in and through
and all around, for everyone to hear…

                                               * “primal poem,” from John Martone


****



End note: reading tonight (7.16.16) Albert Saijo’s Woodrat Flat—a work amply and naturally scattered with Latin biological terms for the abundant flora of this Humboldt County time in the poet’s life—I realize I’d hiked and written seven days into the high Sierra and managed to mention, herein above, only one of the many flora encountered over that time, and what a sad state of affairs that is. So, for the record I’ll say another now: Sierra Stonecrop (Sedum obtusatum)—growing out of lichen filled cracks under and between large rocks laying on rock slabs studded with lodgepole and juniper pine— hardy succulents often rooted in what appeared to be Starburst Shadow Lichen ( phaeophyseia decolor), white to yellow blossoms on long stems protruding into strong  mountain winds, there even prettier than the field book picture—so there.

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