as what they had here.
The boss said “o.k. That’s o.k. then,” and Lois said “also
it’s time for a raise.” I asked did you get it?
“I did.”
So many hours at this chair
hearing tales of the years.
“I was skinny. So thin.”
With her great weight now.
“Thank you son for the tree.
You did it quick too.
The neighbors will say
He came right away.”
Well I needed a change.
A few rounds of sound almond wood —
maybe my craft friend Holly will want them
you won’t be just firewood — a bowl or a salad fork
old down
almond tree
(1993)
MARIANO VALLEJO’S LIBRARY
Mariano Vallejo’s library
was the best in the Eastern Pacific
he was reading Rousseau, Voltaire
(some bought from the ship Leonor)
The Yankees arrived and he welcomed them
though they drove off his horses and cattle
then one year the Casa, books and all, burned to the ground.
The old adobe east of the Petaluma River still stands.
Silvery sheds in the pastures once were chicken-coops
the new box mansions march up the slope.
At my sister’s Empty Shell book party some retired
chicken growers walked in cuddling favorite birds.
Vallejo taught vine-growing tricks to Charles Krug
and Agostin Haraszthy — the vineyards are everywhere
but the anarchist egg growers gone.
The bed of the Bay all shallowed by mining
pre–ice age Sierra dry riverbeds
upturned for gold and the stream gravel washed off by hoses
swept to the valley in floods.
Farmers lost patience, the miners are now gone too.
New people live in the foothills.
pine-pitch and dust, poison oak.
The barnyard fence shades jimson weed,
datura, toloache, white trumpet flower, dark leaf.
The old ones from the world before taught care:
whoever’s here, whatever language —
race, or century, be aware
that plant can scour your mind,
put all your books behind.
WAITING FOR A RIDE
for Gary Holthaus
Standing at the baggage passing time:
Austin Texas airport — my ride hasn’t come yet.
My former wife is making websites from her home,
one son’s seldom seen,
the other one and his wife have a boy and girl of their own.
My wife and stepdaughter are spending weekdays in town
so she can get to high school.
My mother ninety-six still lives alone and she’s in town too,
always gets her sanity back just barely in time.
My former former wife has become a unique poet;
most of my work,
such as it is is done.
Full moon was October second this year,
I ate a mooncake, slept out on the deck
white light beaming through the black boughs of the pine
owl hoots and rattling antlers,
Castor and Pollux rising strong
— it’s good to know that the Pole Star drifts!
that even our present night sky slips away,
not that I’ll see it.
Or maybe I will, much later,
some far time walking the spirit path in the sky,
“that long walk of spirits — where you fall right back into the
narrow painful passageway of the Bardo”
squeeze your little skull
and there you are again
waiting for your ride
(October 5, 2001)
IV
Steady, They Say
DOCTOR COYOTE WHEN HE HAD A PROBLEM
Doctor Coyote when he had a problem
took a dump. On the grass, asked his turds where they lay
what to do? They gave him good advice.
He’d say “that’s just what I thought too”
And do it. And go his way.
CLAWS / CAUSE
for Zenshin
“Graph” is the claw-curve, carve —
grammar a weaving
paw track, lizard-slither, tumble of
a single boulder down. Glacier scrapes across the bedrock,
wave-lines on the beach.
Saying, “this was me”
scat sign of time and mood and place
language is breath, claw, or tongue
“tongue” with all its flickers
might be a word for
hot love, and fate.
A single kiss a tiny cause [claws]
— such grand effects [text].
HOW MANY?
Australia, a group of girls at a corroboree
Lapland, reindeer herdgirls
China, the “yaktail”
Greece, the seven daughters, sisters,
or “the sailing stars”
a cluster of faint stars in Taurus,
the Pleiades,
name of a car in Japan —
“Subaru”
in Mayan — A fistful of boys —
LOADS ON THE ROAD
Stu’s stubby heavy tough old yellow dump truck
parked by his place “For Sale”
he’s fine, but times and people change.
Those loads of river-run and crushed blue mine rock
in our roadbed Stu and me
standing talking engine idling
those days gone now,
days to come.
CARWASH TIME
Looking at a gray-pine,
chunky fire-adapted cones
bunched toward the top,
a big tree there behind the tire shop
— I’m sitting on a low fence
while a wild gang does a benefit
wash-job on my daughter’s car.
Tattooed and goateed white dudes,
brown and black guys,
I say “What you raising money for?”
— “The drug and alcohol halfway
house up the street”
old Ridge sedan
never been this neat
TO ALL THE GIRLS WHOSE EARS I PIERCED BACK THEN
for Maggie Brown Koller
(among others)
Sometimes we remember that moment:
you stood there attentive with clothespins
dangling, setting a bloodless dimple in each lobe
as I searched for a cork & the right-sized needle
& followed the quick pierce with a small gold hoop.
The only guy with an earring
back then
It didn’t hurt that much
a sweetly earnest child
and a crazy country guy
with an earring and a
gray-green cast eye
and even then,
this poem.
SHE KNEW ALL ABOUT ART
She knew all about art — she was fragrant, soft,
I rode to her fine stone apartment, hid the bike in the hedge.
— We met at an opening, her lover was brilliant and rich,
first we would talk, then drift into long gentle love.
We always made love in the dark. Thirty years older than me.
COFFEE, MARKETS, BLOSSOMS
My Japanese mother-in-law
born in America
tough with brokers
a smart trader
grew up working barefoot
in the Delta, on the farm.
Doesn’t like Japan.
Sits in the early morning
by the window, coffee in hand,
gazing at cherry blossoms.
Jean Koda
needing no poem.
IN THE SANTA CLARITA VALLEY
Like skinny wildweed flowers sticking up
hexagonal “Denny’s” sign
starry “Carl’s”
loopy “McDonald’s”
eight-petaled yellow “Shell”
blue-and-white “Mobil” with a big red “O”
growing in the asphalt riparian zone
by the soft roar of the flow
of Interstate 5.
ALMOST OKAY NOW
She had been in an accident: almost okay now,
but inside still recovering,
bones slow-healing — she was anxious
still fearful of cars and of men.
As I sped up the winding hill road
she shuddered — eyes beseeching me —
I slowed the car down.
Out on a high meadow under the moon,
With delicate guidance she showed me
how to make love without hurting her
and then napped awhile in my arms,
smell of sweet grass
warm night breeze
SUS
Two pigs in a pickup sailing down the freeway
stomping with the sway,
gaze back up the roadbed
on their last windy ride.
Big pink ears up looking all around,
taut broad shoulders trim little legs,
bright and lively with their parsnip-colored skin
wind-washed earth-diggers
snuffling in the swamps
they’re not pork, they are forever Sus:
breeze-braced and standing there,
velvet-dusty pigs.
DAY’S DRIVING DONE
Finally floating in cool water
red sun ball sinking
through a smoky dusty haze
rumble of bigrigs,
constant buzz of cars on the 5;
at the pool of Motel 6
in Buttonwillow,
south end of the giant valley,
ghost of ancient Lake Tulare
sunset splash.
SNOW FLIES, BURN BRUSH, SHUT DOWN
A wide line of men in the open pine woods
diesel torches dripping flame
lava soil frost on the sagebrush
loggers walking from brushpile to brushpile
dark sky reddish from brushpiles burning.
At Sidwalter Butte three men on horseback
torches mounted on slender lances
crisscrossing miles of buttes and canyons
hundreds of brushpiles aflame
steady light snow.
(end of the season, Warm Springs, Oregon, 1954)
ICY MOUNTAINS CONSTANTLY WALKING
for Seamus Heaney
Work took me to Ireland
a twelve-hour flight.
The river Liffey;
ale in a bar,
So many stories
of passions and wars —
A hilltop stone tomb
with the wind across the door.
Peat swamps go by:
people of the ice age.
Endless fields and farms —
the last two thousand years.
I read my poems in Galway,
just the chirp of a bug.
And flew home thinking
of literature and time.
The rows of books
in the Long Hall at Trinity
The ranks of stony ranges
above the ice of Greenland.
(March 1995)
(and for 33 pine trees)
Load of logs on
chains cinched down and double-checked
the truck heads slowly up the hill
I bow namaste and farewell
these ponderosa pine
whose air and rain and sun we shared
for thirty years,
struck by beetles needles
turning rusty brown,
and moving on.
— decking, shelving, siding,
stringers, studs, and joists,
I will think of you pines from this mountain
as you shelter people in the Valley
years to come
FOR CAROLE
I first saw her in the zendo
at meal time unwrapping bowls
head forward folding back the cloth
as server I was kneeling
to fill three sets of bowls each time
up the line
Her lithe leg
proud, skeptical,
passionate, trained
by the
heights by the
danger on peaks
STEADY, THEY SAY
Clambering up the rocks of a dry wash gully,
warped sandstone, by the San Juan River,
look north to stony mountains
shifting clouds and sun
— despair at how the human world goes down
Consult my old advisers
“steady” they say
“today”
(At Slickhorn Gulch on the San Juan River, 1999)
V
Dust in the Wind
GRAY SQUIRRELS
Three squirrels like, dash to the end of a pine limb, leap, catch an oak bough angling down — jump across air to another pine — and on — forest grove canopy world “chug - chug” at each other — scolding empty space
Follow their path by the quivering oak leaves
and a few pine needles floating down
ONE DAY IN LATE SUMMER
One day in late summer in the early nineties I had lunch with my old friend Jack Hogan, ex-longshore union worker and activist of San Francisco, at a restaurant in my small Sierra town. The owner had recently bought and torn down the adjoining brick building which had been in its time a second-hand bookstore, “3Rs,” run by a puckish ex-professor. Our lunch table in the patio was right where his counter had been. Jack was married to my sister once. We all hung out in North Beach back in the fifties, but now he lives in Mexico.
This present moment
that lives on
to become
long ago
(1994)
SPILLING THE WIND
The faraway line of the freeway faint murmur of motors, the slow steady semis and darting little cars; two thin steel towers with faint lights high up blinking; and we turn on a raised dirt road between two flooded fallow ricefields — wind brings more roar of cars
hundreds of white-fronted geese
from nowhere
spill the wind from their wings
wobbling and sideslipping down
(Lost Slough, Cosumnes, February 2002)
CALIFORNIA LAUREL
The botanist told us
“Over by Davis Lumber, between house furnishings and plumbing, there’s a Grecian laurel growing — not much smell, but that’s the one that poets wore. Now California laurel’s not a laurel. It can drive off bugs or season a sauce, and it really clears your sinus if you take a way deep breath — ”
Crushed leaves, the smell
reminds me of Annie — by the Big Sur river
she camped under laurel trees — all one summer
eating brown rice — naked — doing yoga —
her chanting, her way deep breath.
BAKING BREAD
Warm sun of a farmyard a huge old chestnut tree just yesterday
the woman said been raided by wild rhesus monkeys
we had boar meat, inoshishi, stewed with chestnuts for lunch.
Deer, boar, monkeys, foxes in these mountains
and lots of dams little trucks on narrow winding roads
Four hours from Tokyo
brightly colored work clothes
living on abandoned farms
fighting concrete dams
“I am hippy” says this woman
baking bread
(early October 2000 in the headwaters of the Mibu River, Southern Japan Alps)
ONE EMPTY BUS
Jirka’s place, a two-story farmhouse, the only one left in this narrow mountain valley. Drive into the yard of cars and little trucks. Several families sitting on the floor by the firepit, heavy board tables loaded with local food. It’s great to see Jirka again — he’s Czech. He and his Japanese wife have been here five years. Their daughter comes in, lovely young woman glancing. Jirka says “she’s shy” — she answers firmly back in English, “Dad, I’m not shy!” Her name’s “Akebi,” flowering vine. I swap stories with the back country friends that came to say hello, after years away. Upstairs was once a silk-worm loft. Jirka and Etsuko weave rugs using goat hair from Greece. A Rinzai priest from the nearby town drops in, planning a poetry reading with our old friend Sansei. Bobbu sings Okinawan folksongs with that haunting falling close. Children sit closest to the fire. Polished dark wood, sweet herb tea. Old house, new songs. After eating and singing, it’s dark. Need to keep moving — back to the car —