I’ve begun to realize how fortunate I’ve been
that my feet have known earth’s language for so long.
An old friend, once bedridden, once said if you can’t walk,
you’re dead. I didn’t believe him then and still don’t.
It’s in the language, I think; but of this I’m sure:
no circle is so small as not to be included
in surrounding horizons.
**
Of all of them, the closest to me is the comma.
It costs nothing more than the distance
of our conscious attention—a pause, awake.
In return, window enough to see now
in relation to its possible nexts…
all told of course by the words
surrounding it.
**
Plumas National Forest
named for it’s Feather River,
it in turn named for the earlier plentitude
of feathers there used by original peoples
who spoke to the river as Ya-loo.
Old growth conifer
linking the Sierra Nevada
with the Cascades.
Ours is the southern slope of Smith Lake,
nicely spaced Sugar Pine, Douglas Fir
and Lodge Pole,
looking across at sparsely treed scree,
outflow rushing east.
We eat and talk, late, into the fire.
Sleep comes easy.
Mornings, the lake gives stillness.
The fish know, the rocks, the trees, the hillsides
drawn to its shores to lay on its face
with the sky.
During the long darkness before the third morning,
coals from the night’s fire creep beneath the stone ring
to ignite collected debris—padded earth, red glow,
coals, tips of branches, sleeping sticks and wakened signals
of smoke
squelched only in the silent happenstance
of rising together with first light—
not by smothering, not by lake waters first offered,
nor the second, but only three,
with the fullness of three.
In the aftermath, the fish, as they do,
ripple the inscrutable composure,
and we, we return, as we do, to the lake’s edge
to be received, and once again to receive.
**
Well maybe so but
it’s those weeds, each one
and all together, that hold
that hillside where it is,
green turning to brown.
**
The fantasy of walls…
I dreamed last night, long,
of a mountain lake
that returned each dawn
its stars
to unhindered skies
that sang their songs
on wind and breeze,
that preserved their words
on the change of leaves
and the mystery
no wall will ever breach.
**
The sun, up, but still east,
buried above
dense cover of cloud and fog,
shouts broken shards of sheen, flings
brilliant pools of blinding light
scattering across the bay,
so precise, shadow
has no place.
**
Re-sounding the center—
a personal story
She walked through the door
into my life
and equivocation’s grip loosened
right there,
me following her home
into marriage, making family,
making home,
and all else ever
swirled, and swirling, around that
unequivocal center, made of its self-
making wholeness,
its real-living stuff,
all subsequent study, all self-searching,
contemplative tools of appreciation,
of understanding of the wherefore
and the what
of this singular human experience
and the all and every
of its joyous
sustenance
at work on the lift and whiff
of the sacred scent of love
at every door
ever since opened.
The heart-mind, the human soul,
knows its own center, performs
its perennial, prismatic functions—
flawlessly
negotiates, gravitates, gathers
and refracts, even as we dance
its periphery, unaware—
and the music, the music
when finally heard, finally recognized,
is the full re-sounding
of everything true, for you—for you,
the resonance of home, the gifted center
of vision’s strength, the quivering celebration
of world as spirit felt
in the depths of your bones.
**
Steep, the trail here is steep.
I stop at coffee berry blossoms.
The hummingbird takes to sticky monkey.
And hawks circle with the sun.
**
Fogs blanket heavy and long this morning,
without descending the canyons,
without chill—the first sliver of blue
just before nine, cleared sky well after,
well-promised heat delivered in full,
sitting here now, just sitting.
**
The heat holds something all its own
the dogs must sense, the crows
too making noise for reasons
so thin or not there at all, something
swallowed by a nothingness
that nonetheless suggests
something.
**
It’s not unusual these days that days slip by
like tasks lost to forgetfulness, misplaced lists
unknowingly swept away, discarded, recalled,
then again set aside until tomorrow.
The old woman in the story too, old even when young,
couldn’t remember the feel of “wanting anything” anymore.
Yet, quite readily, she met each spring,
colors and papers in hand, met the coming spring
at its chosen place,
in its time,
and followed through till earth firmed
in winter’s grip.
The tall flowers in the front courtyard
stand today fully open and so utterly still,
it’s as if air is simply not there—yet we call
each other so vividly, I lean forward in my chair.
