Into the sheer, glistening wind.
The dogs are joyful,
The sky blushes above snowfields,
And she laughs.
The mountain appears,
Silver and pink in the dawn.
The tracks of a lynx
Are drawn straight on the blue slope,
A long slant.
A Modest Boast (Toast)
My mind is sharpened by this sip of mead,
Philosophers attend my wit indeed;
Do not encourage me; there is no need.
A Note on Animals
Do elephants quest? I have seen them lumbering with purpose. Young foxes are so bold as to tease large predatory birds. Ravens watch. Penguins are poker-faced comedians, the Little Tramps of the polar ice. North of Greenland’s dog equator, the dogs are alert even as they sleep. Teddy bears are cute and cuddly. Real bears are humiliated. Horses are majestic; the head of a blooded horse is among the most noble images in the world. Within every tropical bush the promise of an iguana. The buffalo is the animal representation of the sun. The nature of whales is godlike. Of all creatures the mosquito is the most irritating and the least necessary. Cats are more dangerous and less intelligent than they appear. Dogs are less dangerous and more intelligent than they appear. The pedigree of dogs is distinguished; all dogs are descended from wolves. Wolves are superior and misunderstood. Snakes are the wise keepers of the underworld. The less said about marmots the better. Man is the most arrogant of the apes.
Ago
My children, when they were very young,
Played in a great landscape, windy and wild,
Near “the place of the bridge” on the Rio Puerco.
In the middle distance were gullies and dunes,
And a train moved slowly eastward
As if stitching patches of color to the earth.
Rabbits ran from the brown and yellow brush.
My children knew the goodness of that place.
Now when I go by, they are there. Something
Of their delight remains among the rocks,
Tsegi, the place of origin. Their laughter slips
On the ripples of sand, and I look after them.
Division
There is a depth of darkness
In the wild country, days of evening
And the silence of the moon.
I have crept upon the bare ground
Where animals have left their tracks,
And faint cries carry on the summits,
Or sink to silence in the muffled leaves.
Here is the world of wolves and bears
And of old, instinctive being,
So noble and indifferent as to be remote
To human knowing. The scales upon which
We seek a balance measure only a divide.
The Night Sky at Coppermine
At Coppermine we landed in order to take on fuel. We had come down from Holman Island and were on our way to Yellowknife. It was the middle of the night. The plane seated ten or twelve passengers, as I recall, but there were only five on board. We had been buffeted about in the wind and snow, and I was feeling the effects. I did not feel like moving from my seat, but at the same time I thought that a blast of cold fresh air might do me good, and I could at least stretch my legs. When I came to the door, the wind was rushing in with such force that I was nearly knocked backward. I braced myself and struggled out on the stairway. Then my breath caught in my throat. The Northern Lights were hanging, roiling, whipping on the sky, descending squarely upon me. The shock of this magnificent light show was greater than that of the icy wind, and I was stunned again. But nothing could distract me from what I was seeing: the snowy night sky unraveling into great ribbons of dancing color. I had seen the Northern Lights before, but they were never like these. It was an event of great spiritual moment, such as children know in their wonder and innocence. It was Christmas in the universe.
Song Fragments
1 (Lullaby)
In the crook of my arm, place your head there,
And I shall sing you a song of white bread and rye.
And if you care not for my bread lullaby,
I shall hum you the way to Northampton Fair.
2 (Blues)
Memphis Mister, play that horn for me.
Play it slow, play a down-and-out melody.
My woman done left me, left me high and dry.
My baby done left me. Gonna lay me down and die.
3 (Folk)
Hang him high, Sheriff Garrett;
Don’t let the Kid go free.
Hang him high, Sheriff Garrett,
Hang him from a white oak tree.
4 (Country)
Give me a honky-tonk girl,
Give me a honky-tonk girl.
Give me a girl whose skirts do swirl.
Step to the front and step to the rear.
Give me a hot wing and a bottle of beer.
For Wallace Stevens
Yes, I know that time.
Evening is the afternoon,
Snow is incessant.
And blackbirds sit in the limbs.
Do you know this time?
Magpies range in the meadows,
And antelope graze
In foothills of the mountains.
When the blackbird flies
There is a deep emptiness
In which presence was,
In which nameless nothing is.
When the magpie flies
There is a bright arrogance
Of four colors, a
Flag for holy clowns, God’s own.
The Woman Looking In
Near the Taganka Theatre she stands
Wearing a fur-trimmed coat, a white fur hat
And boots. The photograph is bare and flat:
The woman, window, wall and winter fixed
In time, in drab where cold and soot are mixed.
And yet there is a luster on the plane,
As specters of the Northern Lights remain.
I imagine the woman is resolved
To tell a fate in which I am involved.
I’ve seen the tragedy performed next door
And seen the ghost that wanders Elsinore.
Perhaps the woman sees beyond the glass
A spirit schooled in semblance and morass.
Or is she poor Ophelia gone insane
And peering through the frosted windowpane?
The lens has opened on the dismal air,
And nothing that the woman sees is there.
Transparency
I make you this gift with love,
An expression of my spirit
In clean strokes and bright colors.
Seen for the composition it is,
A road curves out to an edge of time,
There is the burn of the setting sun
And twisted brads in the foreground.
Beneath these pigments an abstraction:
Beheld in its deeper meaning,
In the pure aspect of imagining,
There is a muted evening looming
In the ocher of orchards and autumn fields,
And in the lambent flurry of leaves,
You, intrinsic on the plane of desire.
Spectre
How faint her humble form
Suspended there among the stars.
She wears the mantle of a mendicant,
Blue or black and meager against the cold.
At her throat the winding of a shroud
Extends the pallor of her face
Into the water hue of her hair.
She bears no expression,
But a silence pulses at her lips
Like lost whispers of the Magdalen.
And she stands in the glitter of God,
Against disclosure and the chill of heaven.
The Great Fillmore Street Buffalo Drive
Insinuate the sun t
hrough fog
upon Pacific Heights, upon the man on horseback,
upon the herd ascending. There is color and clamor.
And there he waves them down,
those great humpbacked animals,
until their wild grace gone
they lumber and lunge
and blood blisters at their teeth
and their hooves score the street—
and among boulders they settle on the sea.
He looks after them, twisted round upon his sorrow,
the drape of his flag now full and formal,
ceremonial.
One bull, animal representation of the sun,
he dreams back from the brink
to the green refuge of his hunter’s heart.
It grazes near a canyon wall,
along a ribbon of light, among redbud trees,
eventually into shadow.
Then the hold of his eyes is broken;
on the farther rim the grasses flicker and blur,
a hawk brushes rain across the dusk,
meadows recede into mountains, and here and there
are moons like salmonberries
upon the glacial face of the sky.
The Snow Mare
In my dream, a blue mare loping,
Pewter on a porcelain field, away.
There are bursts of soft commotion
Where her hooves drive in the drifts,
And as dusk ebbs on the plane of night,
She shears the web of winter,
And on the far, blind side
She is no more. I behold nothing,
Wherein the mare dissolves in memory,
Beyond the burden of being.
The Bone Strikers
They stand grim in the distance,
Brandishing the bones with which
They strike. They are counted on
Though they are poor and wretched
In their wounds. Yet they are sung
Among the camps, and their shields
Are regarded with fear and wonder.
How plain is their regalia! How rude
Their savage style! They are chosen,
And in the choice there is severance
And sorrow. In near time they will go
And roam the darkness, having gone.
Yahweh to Urset
I pray that you are kept safe throughout this day, that you live as wholly as you can, that you see things that you have not seen before and that more of them are beautiful than not, more of them delightful than not. I pray that you hold easily in your hands the balance of the earth and sky, that you laugh and cry, know freedom and restraint, some joy and some sorrow, pleasure and pain, much of life and a little of death. I pray that you are grateful for the gift of your being, and I pray that you celebrate your life in the proper way, with grace and humility, wonder and contentment, in the strong, deep current of your spirit’s voice. I pray that you are happily in love in the dawn and that you are more deeply in love in the dusk.
The Essence of Belonging
Consider the shiver of the mirrored moon:
You appear in the shredded light,
A figure fixed in approach, suspended.
Like Nolde’s Sternenwandler you stand
Mysterious among the stars. You persist,
And a clean wind measures your persistence.
Along a cleavage in space the day becomes,
And you conspire in the invention of belonging,
Radiant, jealously imagined, estranged from time,
And to the crowded habitation of the mind
You bring a solitude, a mere and sensual silence
In which the essence of belonging belongs.
To an Aged Bear
Hold hard this infirmity.
It defines you. You are old.
Now fix yourself in summer,
In thickets of ripe berries,
And venture toward the ridge
Where you were born. Await there
The setting sun. Be alive
To that old conflagration
One more time. Mortality
Is your shadow and your shade.
Translate yourself to spirit;
Be present on your journey.
Keep to the trees and waters.
Be the singing of the soil.
The Bear
What ruse of vision
escarping the wall of leaves,
rending incision
into countless surfaces,
would cull and color
his somnolence, whose old age
has outworn valor,
all but the fact of courage?
Seen, he does not come,
Move, but seems forever there,
Dimensionless, dumb,
In the windless noon’s hot glare.
More scarred than others
These years since the trap maimed him,
Pain slants his withers,
drawing up the crooked limb.
Then he is gone, whole,
Without urgency, from sight,
As buzzards control,
Imperceptibly, their flight.
A Benign Self-Portrait
A mirror will suffice, no doubt.
The high furrowed forehead,
The heavy-lidded Asian eyes,
The long-lobed Indian ears.
Brown skin beginning to spot,
Of an age to bore and be bored.
I turn away, knowing too well
My face, my expression
For all seasons, my half smile.
Birds flit about the feeder,
The dog days wane, and I
Observe the jitters of leaves
And the pallor of the ice-blue beyond.
I read to find inspiration. I write
To restore candor to the mind.
There are raindrops on the window,
And a peregrine wind gusts on the grass.
I think of my old red flannel shirt,
The one I threw away in July.
I would like to pat the warm belly of a
Beagle or the hand of a handsome woman.
I look ahead to cheese and wine,
And a bit of Bach, perhaps,
Or Schumann on the bow of Yo-Yo Ma.
I see the mountains as I saw them
When my heart was young.
But were they not a deeper blue,
Shimmering under the fluency of skies
Radiant with crystal light? Across the way
The yellow land lies out, and standing stones
Form distant islands in the field of time.
There is a stillness on this perfect world,
And I am content to settle in its hold.
I turn inward on a wall of books.
They are old friends, even those that
Have dislodged my dreams. One by one
They have shaped the thing I am.
These are the days that swarm
Into the shadows of legend. I ponder.
And when the image on the glass
Is refracted into the prisms of the past
I shall remember: my parents speaking
Quietly in a warm familiar room, and
I bend to redeem an errant, broken doll.
My little daughter, her eyes brimming
With love, beholds the ember of my soul.
There is the rattle of a teacup, and
At the window and among the vines,
The whir of a hummingbird’s wings.
In the blue evening, in another room,
There is the faint laughter of ghosts,
And in a tarnished silver frame, the
likeness of a boy who bears my name.
Prayer for Words
My voice restore for me.
—NAVAJO
Here is the wind bending the reeds westward,
The patchwork of morning on gray moraine:
Had I words I could
tell of origin,
Of God’s hands bloody with birth at first light,
Of my thin squeals in the heat of his breath,
Of the taste of being, the bitterness,
And scents of camas root and chokecherries.
And, God, if my mute heart expresses me,
I am the rolling thunder and the bursts
Of torrents upon rock, the whispering
Of old leaves, the silence of deep canyons.
I am the rattle of mortality.
I could tell of the splintered sun. I could
Articulate the night sky, had I words.
On the Cause of a Homely Death
Even the ashes are instilled
In dust. Imagine it was age
And worthy destiny fulfilled,
Not fear, not loneliness, not rage.
The Blind Astrologers
Now, at evening, we hear them.
They sheer and shuffle, cracking
Branches and heaving the air.
Always shyly they appear.
In radiance they take shape
Faintly, their great heads hung low
On arcs of age, their dull eyes
Compassing the murky moon.
They sway and impress the earth
With claws. They incise the ice.
Stars of the first magnitude
Pulse the making of their dance.
They ascend the ancient bridge
And lay fishes in our way,
So to feed us and our dogs.
Along the green slant southward
The blind astrologers blaze
The long traces of our quest.
They lead us, dead reckoning
By the suns they cannot see.
We regard them with wonder,
Fear, and sorrow. They mutter
And cry with voices like ours;
They mime a human anguish.
When they take their leave they fade
Through planes and prisms of rain
Into the drifts of story,