The all I'm finding

 

***

—from William Everson’s “The Poet is Dead,”

     a memorial to Robinson Jeffers

     When fog comes again to the canyons

     The redwoods will know what it means.

     The giant sisters

     Gather it into their merciful arms

     And stroke silence.

***

**

Morning fogs collect western ridges,

conceal shifting constellations,

tumble tree-lined canyons,

halt and hover 

over the waiting 

valley floor.  

**

After fumbling around a lot

the last few years, I finally find

the form to request another twenty

is all blanks—no questions, 

no multiple-choice answers 

to check,

  so I look up to Orion’s song

  of the joys of morning chill,

    I turn to Diablo, who shadows the east

    so the sun will find the day

      and they say,

      

        if you simply remember these simple givens,

        you’ll never need no one else

        to tell you your way.

**

“Did he just read a poem,” someone asked

of William Stafford, “I thought he was just talking,”

which of course was what he wanted, to follow

the words, their working taking him, telling him into 

the world from which they came,

heading wherever they might go, rubbing 

comfortably in the warmth of that which had not 

or could not yet be told—you know, just talk.

**

The guy in the movie

we learn at the end

is terminally ill,

spending his days 

drinking beer on a beach

in the sun.

I ask how one can spend

one’s last days like that,

while, though not ill,

definitely terminal, I sit on a couch 

sipping wine in the dark, watching 

some other guy die.

**

The raptures in our lives pass, do of course 

pass and life makes its way 

impressed with their passing

nonetheless so.

Earth remembers us and we it—star dust 

doesn’t just disappear.

**

I sit looking out the large back window

of our morning quiet home, 

at the hills, disappearing night time lights, 

slow-spreading haze—latent vows, 

imbedded intentions resurfaced, 

re-articulated, new 

in sun-lit now—how, how to live 

the here-given—

all other considerations, 

distraction.

**

Is it the hills

that through the night

hold the light

the sun comes for,

the hills that rise

to meet our climbing feet

through the misted air

of morning,

is it the hills 

that trace the songs

that shape our hearts

to hold the hurting world ?

Indeed.

**

The first thing

I notice,

the willows’

leaves turning,

baring limbs

reaching out

to the sky

that holds us—

may I never 

forget this way.

**

—Buckeye Canyon

Two small birds

sweep the path,

make the way

for walking 

clear ahead.

I accept

the welcome,

continue—

the canyon’s

open mouth

takes me in,

as I am,

giving me

everything

it has, is,

asking nothing 

in return.

**

—11/8 Firth Creek

Election day reprieve—

we loose the lunar eclipse

to rain-singing creeks.

**

Rain drops to my face,

eye-lids blinking wet

like flapping pant legs,

splashing boots—cold fingers

clutching poncho edges

for un-given warmth—rain drops

on my face, making smiles.

**

—For David Schooley

Low in the hills, the steady lift 

of freeway streams rise with the rush 

of a passing train, neither of which 

were here when oaks lined the bay

and marshlands reached deeply 

into the valley.

But the hills, the hills persevere, with help

of course—Hummingbird and Coyote

both staying behind for that. 

**

Light well-precedes the sun, moon 

lingers high and fully to the west.

And cold-charged maples

grow crimson.

Taking refuge with the stone Buddha 

who sits at the fence beneath the almond tree,  

chanting joined by Thursday garbage trucks.

**

—Chaparral broom

Coyote bush

pushes tiny brush blossoms,

bright white in grey-green,

to signal coming winter

to grasses turning 

brown-beige.

and from here, where??

Windows in the east-facing hills catch the sun

of movement-moments that fire, and flutter out.

Crossing thousands of miles of time, the barest touch 

and brush of day-breaking light.

**

I’ve heard mountains grow at nearly the same rate

as fingernails, and continue too, 

well after we’re gone.

**

**

—Bulgaria

Sofia’s morning streets are dark at six; 

groups of young men, small windowed store-fronts, 

coffee, hand-held breakfasts—talk, laughter and smoke

crowd the sidewalks.

Pastel colored cabs stop if you wave—women,

mostly in pairs, do that.

**

Twenty thousand years of human activity,

be it the Balkans or the Sierras—we don’t know

who they were, but related seems true enough.

**

Driving to the interior today, having slept 

longer stretches without waking, 

but still deeply tired, she asks the count 

of days left till we return home—I laugh 

(but make the calculation)—

touring with a group, no longer just us two,

reveals pandemic-shaped parameters 

unknowingly adopted—

among the other strangers, we meet

our post-Covid selves.

**

Rolling west through open Thracian lowlands

—arbors in every yard, roadside markets,

      mist-distant mountains, fall gold-yellows

         and withered leaf wheat-country meadows.

**

Of the seven hills of ancient Plovdiv, six remain

for counting—the seventh disappeared

with its minerals.

**

Bulgarian roses are gown for their oil. 

Petals picked in the morning

stem the oil’s return

to the root.

**

Along A-1, open plain lowlands. 

Mountains to the south shared with Greece,

to the north conceal the Balkans.

And the road sign points to Istanbul.

**

We cross the Balkans today at their lowest pass,

where they drop into the not really black

Black Sea,

**

**

—Romania

Cross the Danube to the North

and you’ll find the Latin alphabet 

you thought you’d lost.

**

—Bucharest, Revolutionary Square:

—The cen   r  is     ever

                te                  y where

              off-

                     center

                                  un-finish  -d—

**

Birds circle statues in sky-clearing blue

chill, sidewalks accepting every foot

that chooses to fall, whatever 

the way taken.

**

We leave the city today by train;

mountains and forests, the last leg 

of our touring,

a quiet good-by— empty hotel restaurant,

hot coffee—talk-memories linger

above the pen’s morning liturgy.

**

Some of those poets in old China

were on to something

they just couldn’t get into words

either—the day’s ebbs and flows, 

unfinished conversations, aimless flashes 

of joy embedded in just hanging-out,

can leave the best-gripped pen

right where it rests.

**

Recrossing Transylvania’s Carpathian range,

meandering fall-kissed forests,

glistening roadside streams, we return 

to its southern plains, 

the ring of shadowed mountains,

fields of wheat and sun flowers,

that all say it’s time too,

to return home.

We don’t resist, will not linger;

but the taste of this has found with us

a place.

**

And the leaves in Bucharest,

golden weaving messengers, 

blanket the ground 

with fall’s call.

And the smell,

dust-burnt-fresh,

crushed and rustled

to chilled park air,

leaf upon leaf, myriads

of passing feet.

**

And I recall our host, standing at the edge

of the wooden press that inked the first letters

of the first Romanian words ever written, script 

formed and printed by those not Romanian, 

as he spoke of the importance of our presence,

our attention, to the process taken place then, 

taking place now—it’s not so much the language, 

he said, 

but the culture, the “culture of movement 

as expression of being” that makes 

in its making, Romania Romanian—and indeed 

together all of us, who we are, who we will be.

Whatever it was yesterday....today is this...

 

     I think of recluse masters a century away,

     I nurture your secrets. Your true nature

     eludes me here, but taken by quiet, I can

     linger this exquisite moon on out to the end.

                                         —T’ao Ch’ien

quietness abounds, 

unfolding breaths, touch-less silence 

soothing shadowed chatter

to background

**

Shadowed bamboo

quivering, dripping 

passing rain drops.

**

After days of following the ants

here and there, as they say ought be done,

closing each door as found, 

they turn, on the other side, another way,

without so much as good-bye.

**

—after Simon Ortiz

we can’t speak ever

what words won’t say,

so, who speaks, poet,

whose songs are sung

in our singing—is it that we

just hum what’s heard ?

**

I’m old; but the old man

with long silver hair

says, “first say a prayer—

first make coffee,”

as if he’s waited

all these years

to say it

just to me.

**

Rains have passed.

Morning clouds break to white, lift 

to meet the rising sun.

The universe has its own language.

The master threw the student’s books

into the river—the poems

never stopped.

What the river says

is what I say.

**

answerless, the crow drops

from the great eucalyptus 

without a call

**

Two shots, one each arm—

the whole body aches its way

to health—no soaring here.

**

I stumble across an old poem today,

written ten years ago to the month, 

leaning against rocks in the Sierra,

preparing to turn sixty-nine.

And I wonder, after cleaning the house,

where all the chance for wisdom went.

Didn’t find it there, can’t seem to find it here.

But the carpet’s clean, dustless floors feel good 

to bared feet—and like then, I’m here now, 

so I write.

**

First day of fall, the open saddle 

of the State Park,

summer temperatures returning,

seed-puffs dancing 

to what breezes

don’t say.

**

Can’t really say why

people working words

for reasons

they likely can’t say

catches me like it seems

it does them,

but it does and I’ve gone

and continue to go with it

as readily as rust

to an empty tin can can,

looking, I’d guess, for what

filled it in the first place.

**

—Morning glory

 

reaching tendrils,

tides of spreading green,

purple-white petals,

quietly playing sunlight.

**

Never-flowering fig trees

simply ripen round plump purple

fruit that droops among the leaves,

invariably beyond reach.

**

sparse traces of early stars

say big dipper says 

which way 

north is

**

Late September’s early fall

holds darkness longer, calls it

earlier evenings, 

shares season’s shiftings

without claim, 

opens October’s door 

for longer, more colorful

considerations.

**

Being means breathing,

deeper, therefore, 

more carefully there

at the breath,

where everything, for us,

always was, always really is

—all attempts to hold it,

wrong-headed, learning to go 

with it, the holding of reason

beyond all reason. 

**

**

Light requires nothing, asks nothing

of us, not even that we turn to it

as it embraces us.