The Green River's End

"Sitting in the boat, I look at red trees and forget how far I've come.
Drifting to the green river's end, I see no one." – Wang Wei, from "Song of the Peach Tree Spring"











The Sunset Trail very few have taken and we are the only ones gliding along on bikes.
It is near dawn and each powder green pocket of the woods swarm by mosquitos.
We pass along fast enough, chasing the last bars of sunlight across the trail, and they cannot land.
All of the cars along the shoreline road have exited the Peninsula.
We watch the round blaze of headlights as they follow their own trail back to hotel rooms.
As all of the people have retreated we hear only the great lake now as our companion
and it laps along the rocky shore as if an enormous snare across a drum.
A few night hawks circle above the old bay lighthouse as we pass it, now asleep, window lids shut.
The old world opens up. Whose postcards had shown men and women from the thirties
gather around a wooden stage up near Nicolet Bay and the children helped to build a fire.
We might hear singing and the crackle of flames from a bonfire as faces lit up like bright moons.
At every old and haggard pine rising up dark as charcoal we found the spirals of silence bloom.
We had thought of living along the blanket of the beach. What morning bird woke us up.

They Know the Trail

"...people are frightened when they see the heights
but once they arrive they know the trail..." – Stonehouse, 1












1.

Spend most of my days thinking of mountains
not necessarily Rainier or Hood out west
but any place where perceptions fall away
and the leaves from aspens become new friends
Out on Sunset Trail along Door Peninsula
there was the great lake just waiting there
what else do we want from our oldest of friends
wide beautiful blue faces singing invitations

You Can Carve
All You Want

"...even if they manage to avoid the karma of good deeds, bad deeds, and inactivity, if they deceive others with words, their meditation won't be true. It's like carving a turd to look like sandalwood. You can carve all you want, but you can't make it smell like incense." – from Stonehouse, Zen Talks











Aug. 8


We took Cty. Rd F from Fish Creek to Bailey's Harbor, nothing more than a fifteen minute drive through the inland farms and wildflower fields. All the edges of Door are full of every imaginable business, restuarant, cafe, park for observation, but the inland is still a throwback to old times where you can use your imagination again and wonder what it must have been like to farm a piece of land that was, only a few miles away, completely surrounded by Lake Michigan. This is what you find out once at Bailey's Harbor. The Ridges Sanctuary is not something you see often, a preserved and finely trailed (accessible) swatch of land that shows us the various receding shorelines of the lake, beginning somewhere around 1400 to current day. Every new shoreline had left its mark and its residue and has left now terraces called swales – a sort of flat ring of land parallelting today's lake and which grows in a variety of flaura and fauna. We stopped along a boardwalk bench at sandy swale, one of those of a series of four, and looked out onto a brilliant field of high rising grasses, not a single invasive in sight. It trailed off in the distance much like a pond might, its own edges not quite visible, surrounded by the foreignly beatiful and layered Tamarack trees which must feed well near water. Of throwbacks – and who doesn't need to experience things that they have never quite seen before – we get a chance to see a Boreal Forest thriving and virtually untouched. The contrast of this purity, this history by green, tells us immediately a story of encroachment, of course, for, as mentioned, the rest of Door is encroachment, the very essence of it. What is it that works over the mind here? We had just come off the Wintergreen Trail, lined by ground cover Juniper, more Tamaracks, Blackberry bramples and sedges a few feet down. The deeper we got into Wintergreen the less we could hear the traffic. If you make it this deep, the phone in your pocket begins to seem like a disturbance. I believe the mind needs a sort of counter balance at all times in our age. If we are not stunned by what we are doing away from the phone, then we will grab for the phone. The silence here at the Sanctuary, the pristine diversity is very much like walking through a painting of rare beauty and therefore gathers our attention, silences that spinning that always working over us the rest of our lives. I consider it for art and would be inspired to make my feeble attempts at painting. Later in the day, driving away from here, I can actually sense the magnetic beauty of the swales fade some. Could I live here? Could I live in among this natural bath? Love does come in a hundred forms. We spend most of our days thinking it can only come by one form, that of another, a mate, and the conversation and intimacy that comes along. All the while we walk among a earth that constitutes virtually all of our existence. All of it. Everywhere, all the time, bathing us, not asking a thing but to exist. We don't even have to think of it as necessarily giving. It just is. But because our selves have evolved along with this such scenes, we may (and should be I'd say) attracted to it. Instead we live as though the swales and other parcels like it, are something of a traveling minstrel show, only to be loved here and there like visitors. We might just as well uproot our lives, move to a swale, learn to love again all. What would happen then?


1.
I left all my things at my city home
A bed a couch every little kitchen utensel
And filled the car with essential clothing
Then headed out for the town of Fish Creek
With a certain frame of mind nothing mattered
Not the fifty years behind or decade or two to come
I found it a good omen that the sky was cerulean
And that I found my little cottage ten steps from the Lake

One Granite Ridge

"One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool..." – Snyder, from "Piute Creek"











"Once you get past
the thousand cars
then you will see..."
Could close your eyes
for first hour not yet
to the four hawks
circling up there at top
of Pothole trail
where the rockfall
as mystic as a wild curtain.
"Who made this place?"
Could close your eyes
for the first hour not yet
craggy juniper that
dances right out of cracks
of the erupted quartzite
where we'll wonder
why the world does
to come to call here
for all the worlds' secrets.
Could close your eyes
for the first hour not yet
that gulley we've come
to love like a sister, mother
father and elder
for it has laid its hand
wide open for us,
gave us that creek.
"Why don't we learn
to love like the creek does?"
We sit and learn
that the lake isn't just
a lake – it speaks.
Listen says the wind
and is off leaping rock to rock.

Pines Grasp the Clouds

"In splintery cookhouse light
grab my tin pisspot hat
Ride off to the show in a crummy-truck
And start the Cat..." – Snyder, from Myths and Texts











Same old brown water bay
at the receiving end of spillway.
Been on TV recently,
log rollers spin away in the shallows
sponsors' flags, fine crowd
for a saturday, cameras aroll,
a train rolling past shrieking brakes.
Just across the impoundment
an airport and the metal birds
all day circling waiting their moment.
It's not what I'm doing
but the want of it – jump in!
the lake, shuck the two-hull pontoon,
get rid of the fast little machines
and floating blow ups.
Swim up stream alongside the fish,
bot with the corking timber afloat.
Wade up into deep sand shorelines
find the wood, start the fire,
listen to the wildwoods
and find great blue heron friends.
The old Voyageurs
used to tip their boats upside down
at night, light up a smudge,
listen to the bugs buzz
around the birchbark, smoke 'em
out and peel off the skin
of carp – the tomorrows
of the tomorrows down in raw river.
Trade shacks ten skins
hanging along the drying rope.
"Good to see ya Slim."
Then off again into the woods.

The Way is the Refuge

"The way is the refuge for the myriad creatures.
It is that by which the good man protects,
And that by which the bad is protected.
Beautiful words when offered will win high rank in return." – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching









July 31


At eye level
hunched over paddle board
chop of waves
comes the voice
of the earth

listen to the chatter
listen to the alter ego
for most the time
we stand so stern above
and say to ourselves
        – thank you river for the fish
           thank you for the blue
           thank you for the speed
           by motors
           and our lovely sails

feet down there deep
under the board
and it is the bowels
of the earth cooling
down to where the washed
over timber has been
blinded but not unloved
by the call the flow

let go of the board
who are you my son
water to water
two diamond eyes
two miracles by pupils
back home again