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  for Linda (again)

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  Water

  Cabbage

  Mom and Dad

  Night Dharma

  Modern Times

  Adding It Up

  Young Love

  The Movie

  Livingston Suite

  Hill

  Buried Time

  Angry Women

  Before the Trip

  Paris Television

  Opal

  The Man Who Looked for Sunlight

  Alcohol

  En Veracruz en 1941

  In Veracruz in 1941

  Dream Love

  Flower, 2001

  Patagonia Poem

  Reading Calasso

  The Bear

  Bars

  Diabetes

  Searchers

  Mother Night

  The Creek

  Birds Again

  Becoming

  Portal, Arizona

  Easter Morning

  Corrido Sonorense

  Sonoran Corrida

  Older Love

  Los viejos tiempos

  The Old Days

  Two Girls

  The Little Appearances of God

  Waves

  Time

  An Old Man

  To a Meadowlark

  November

  Cold Poem

  Invasive

  On the Way to the Doctor’s

  Español

  Spanish

  Pico

  The Short Course

  Science

  The Fish in My Life

  A Letter to Ted & Dan

  Effluvia

  Joseph’s Poem

  Unbuilding

  Suzanne Wilson

  Current Events

  Poem of War (i)

  Poem of War (ii)

  Rachel’s Bulldozer

  After the War

  Brothers and Sisters

  Fence Line Tree

  Saving Daylight

  Incomprehension

  Memorial Day

  Letter Poem to Sam Hamill and Dan Gerber

  Hakuin and Welch

  L’envoi

  Marching

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright, Credits, and Feedback Link

  Donor page

  Water

  Before I was born I was water.

  I thought of this sitting on a blue

  chair surrounded by pink, red, white

  hollyhocks in the yard in front

  of my green studio. There are conclusions

  to be drawn but I can’t do it anymore.

  Born man, child man, singing man,

  dancing man, loving man, old man,

  dying man. This is a round river

  and we are her fish who become water.

  Cabbage

  If only I had the genius of a cabbage

  or even an onion to grow myself

  in their laminae from the holy core

  that bespeaks the final shape. Nothing

  is outside of us in this overinterpreted world.

  Bruises are the mouths of our perceptions.

  The gods who have died are able to come

  to life again. It’s their secret that they wish

  to share if anyone knows that they exist.

  Belief is a mood that weighs nothing on anyone’s

  scale but nevertheless exists. The moose

  down the road wears the black cloak of a god

  and the dead bird lifts from a bed of moss

  in a shape totally unknown to us.

  It’s after midnight in Montana.

  I test the thickness of the universe, its resilience

  to carry us further than any of us wish to go.

  We shed our shapes slowly like moving water,

  which ends up as it will so utterly far from home.

  Mom and Dad

  Gentle readers, feel your naked belly button where

  you were tied to your mother. Kneel and thank

  her for your jubilant but woebegone life. Don’t

  for a moment think of the mood of your parents

  when you were conceived which so vitally affects

  your destiny. You have no control over that and

  it’s unprofitable to wonder if they were pissed

  off or drunk, bored, watching television news,

  listening to country music, or hopefully out in

  the orchard grass feeling the crunch of wind-

  fall apples under their frantic bodies.

  Night Dharma

  How restlessly the Buddha sleeps

  between my ears, dreaming his dreams

  of emptiness, writing his verbless poems.

  (I almost rejected “green tree

  white goat red sun blue sea.”)

  Verbs are time’s illusion, he says.

  In the stillness that surrounds us

  we think we have to probe our wounds,

  but with what? Mind caresses mind

  not by saying no or yes but neither.

  Turn your watch back to your birth

  for a moment, then way ahead beyond

  any expectation. There never was a coffin

  worth a dime. These words emerge

  from the skin as the sweat of gods

  who drink only from the Great Mother’s breasts.

  Buddha sleeps on, disturbed when I disturb

  him from his liquid dreams of blood and bone.

  Without comment he sees the raven carrying

  off the infant snake, the lovers’ foggy

  gasps, the lion’s tongue that skins us.

  One day we dozed against a white pine stump

  in a world of dogwood and sugar plum blossoms.

  An eye for an eye, he said, trading

  a left for my right, the air green tea

  in the sky’s blue cup.

  Modern Times

  I

  Each man should own three

  belts just as he once had three

  legs the better to turn corners.

  Women had three arms

  the better to hold things.

  Now without these extra limbs

  men and women can’t remember

  the life they don’t know they’ve forgotten

  packed away with dried plum buds

  and evening primroses. They’ve traded

  their limbs for clocks and ideas,

  their hearts packed in salt. They thought

  it was noon but
it’s nearly midnight.

  II

  Every poem is the poem

  before the last. We know this absurd

  feeling of wishing to live on the lip

  of a future that can’t quite

  manage to happen, the ache

  of the girl who decided not to exist

  before she was born, the quizzical

  trashcan behind the abortion clinic,

  the unacknowledged caskets that always

  arrive on night flights. We assumed

  God loved most the piety of beggars,

  that we should properly cower before

  our elected murderers, that we could

  sit tight behind our locked doors

  and try to pretend we were rich

  and happy children until time wore out.

  III

  We worked for food and shelter

  and then bought the arts and better cars,

  bigger houses, smarter children

  who couldn’t really learn to read and write.

  It was too hard. The arts escaped

  to a different heaven to get rid of us.

  We misunderstood food and shelter,

  flies crawling on a window,

  fluttering up and down,

  seeing the outside beyond reach

  because of the invention of glass

  that couldn’t be undone. We lived

  within the outside for two million years

  and now it’s mostly photos.

  We chose wallpaper and paint over leaves

  and rivers. In our dream of safety

  we decided not to know the world.

  IV

  The question is, does the dog

  remember her childhood?

  If so, our universe changes,

  tilts a bit. We do not willingly

  offer much to the creature world,

  a little food to amuse our loneliness.

  We made funeral pyres of the houses

  of bears and birds because they neglected

  to console our paths to fortune.

  They commit love with an intensity

  unknown to us and without advice.

  They read the world rather than books

  and don’t bother with names to identify

  themselves. To them we’re a Chinese film

  without subtitles. Meanwhile my dog

  dreams back to her seven-week childhood

  in Wisconsin, over so soon before she took

  a flight west to Montana, emerging

  from a crate with a quizzical smile.

  V

  Do more people die asleep or awake?

  We can easily avoid both conditions

  but I’m not telling you how.

  Why interrupt the ancient flow?

  There’s nothing more solid in life

  than the will toward greed and self-destruction

  but also beauty, who doesn’t mind

  sitting on her own tired knees.

  How can I find my mother and father,

  a sister and a brother if they’re dead?

  I’ve had to learn other languages

  to make contact, the creature world

  and flora, the mute landscape

  offering a quiet music without verbs

  and nouns. This is the language

  of the departed ones. Those who have become

  birds seem happy to be no longer us.

  Salvation isn’t coming. It’s always been here.

  VI

  I’ve been on a full-time moon

  watch this winter for reasons

  I can’t determine. Maybe I’m helping out?

  My government is so loathsome I’ve turned

  to other, much more important things.

  The beetle takes a half hour on a leisurely

  stroll across the patio, heading

  northwest as if it truly mattered.

  I think of Wallace Stevens in his office

  doing insurance work as if it truly mattered.

  He stays late on a spring afternoon

  watching swallows swoop for insects

  that haven’t yet hatched in Hartford,

  an old poet greedy for the life

  he was never remotely to have;

  a white marriage, love as a cold

  cinderblock never to arise from the rubble,

  his life a long slow Dresden

  burning its own jealous ashes.

  VII

  I can freely tie myself up without rope.

  This talent is in the realm of antimagic

  and many people have it. On a dawn

  walk despite the creek, birds and forest

  I have to get through the used part,

  the murky fluid of rehearsals

  and resentments, but then they drain away

  and I’m finally where I already am,

  smack-dab in the middle of each step,

  the air you can taste, the evening

  primrose that startled by my visit

  doesn’t turn away. When I read

  the ancient manuscripts of earth

  many of the lines are missing

  that I’m expected to complete.

  I’m the earth, too, sharing this song

  of blood and bone with the whale,

  monkey and house cat. At eye level

  with toad our eyes share the passage

  of this ghost ship we boarded at birth.

  VIII

  There are a lot of muted grays in life,

  dull bronzes, mornings the color

  of a lead sinker that will never help

  you catch a fish, and then a trace

  of sun allows you to see down into the water

  where three minnows pass diagonally above

  a sunken log, two tadpoles, the pebble-

  circular swirl of a spawning bed, a glutinous

  clot of frog eggs, and farther out

  a turtle peering above a lily pad’s edge.

  Salvation from mood can be slow

  in coming. Two song sparrows pick

  this moment to fight over a lady,

  a private woodland Iraq shrieking

  “She’s mine,” as she pretends to be otherwise

  occupied. The sky doesn’t study

  our immobility. When the mood has fled

  I listen to the air, and a cloud is only

  a cloud again though I’d like to see a dragon

  emerging upward to the water’s surface,

  a gesture to lift us above our human weight.

  IX

  I salute the tiny insect crawling

  back and forth across my journal,

  perhaps eating the infinitesimal particles

  of dried sweat from the effort to make music

  and reason out of the ocean of life

  most often opaque as dirty cream.

  I tell this insect how unlucky for him.

  He should be outside eating the tender cores

  of spring flowers or alighting on a bird’s

  back the better to fly away on another’s wings.

  Our lives are novels we don’t want to read

  and we so gracelessly translate their world

  for our own purposes. We live morosely

  in this graveyard long before we’re buried.

  Still we love our green and blue world

  and leap out of our lives from sea to shining

  sea. We know that our despised world

  is our Great Mother’s breast warm to our desert lips.

  X

  What I’m doing is what I’m already

  doing. The mind can’t accept the ordinary.

  The pope fed through his nose would prefer

  pasta marinara as he grabs at heaven

  as a gentle old monkey might at a vine

  while hanging from a tree because of the waiting

  jaguar far below. Finding myself where I already
>
  am is a daily chore. Chaos herself is fragile.

  A step takes seconds. Clocks leak our invisible

  blood in invisible increments. I’d rather say,

  “sun is up, high brutal noon, sun is down,

  night comes,” in rhythm with the bird’s superior

  clock. I can no longer reshape the unbearable

  world and have given up to count birds.

  Up the mountain in a mesquite thicket

  two pale-blue female lazuli buntings yield

  to the tally clicker in my vest pocket,

  their souls intact, ignoring my glorious smile.

  I’ve abandoned the culture’s ghost not my life,

  Jim on the south slope at dawn counting birds.

  Adding It Up

  I forgot long division but does one

  go into sixty-six more than sixty-six times?

  There’s the mother, two daughters, eight dogs,

  I can’t name all the cats and horses, a farm

  for thirty-five years, then Montana, a cabin,

  a border casita, two grandsons, two sons-in-law,

  and graced by the sun and the moon, red wine

  and garlic, lakes and rivers, the millions of trees.

  I can’t help but count out of habit, the secret

  door underneath the vast stump where I founded

  the usual Cro-Magnon religion, a door

  enveloped by immense roots through which one day

  I watched the passing legs of sandhill cranes,

  napping where countless bears have napped,

  an aperture above where the sky and the gods

  may enter, yet I’m without the courage to watch

  the full moon through this space. I can’t figure

  out a life. We’re groundlings who wish to fly.

  I live strongly in the memories of my dead dogs.

  It’s just a feeling that memories float around

  waiting to be caught. I miss the cat that perched

  on my head during zazen. Since my brother died

  I’ve claimed the privilege of speaking to local rocks,

  trees, birds, the creek. Last night a broad moonbeam