One of the Those
Stones

"One of those stones is precious.
It can change everything.
It can make the darkness shine.
It's the light switch for the whole country." – Transtromer, from "Further In"










One stone had felt like a little piece of home
there were all the proper steps
along the ridgeline for those who would
walk past the architecture of extinction
the old and tilted radio towers
no longer blinking red
and the long wires for power to a broken shack
this ridge they did not quarry
and it likely stood as a hallowed gate for the crushers
and and diggers of stone all those years
a gate that was immobile and held within it
a kingdom of fog in the morning
and of the villages of small animals
of the forest floor by night
where I leap to right now and land with as much of their eye
as I can
then walk along the golden carpet
of loamy limestone
along that bridge to the air where all the gaits
are said to begin

The Fields Want
Us to Walk Upright

"It's been a hard winter, but summer is here and the fields want us to walk upright." – Transtromer, from "Standing Up"












I

Finally on our way back down the bluff, along the asphalt road which used to carry the crushers and quarry equipment, we passed a woman with sunglasses on. It was nearing January. No matter these days that it was fifty degrees. The sky that color of the robins' eggs. A false excitedness had filled the air all along the ridge above as if the wild, perhaps gullible, that perhaps winter would be forgiven this year and we might skip right to spring. The woman could see nothing and as we passed she lifted her hands to her eyes and said blindly 'it feels like spring.' All the woods had been transparent. No leaves to stitch a remaining fabric. Crooked limbs revealed. Without the growing towers of leaning snow all the romance of the woods had been forgone for what we could see as its truest survival: the craggy trunks of the stone bound pine or birch trees sipping from thin stocks and the seeds and walnuts had already been hoarded. Nothing to read; no secret tracks along the frozen cheeks of the snow. We had walked in among the curled detritus of the limestone quarry, no doubt used for the base of highways and interstates. Old shacks, half-walled, surrounded by power lines, the perfect architecture of extraction. Short stacks of mud to gravel. Little pits. False roads that now curved in around the long white candles of birch. The woman we would later pass would walk right through with her sunshades on, her hands over her forehead. Old rock, vertebrae, houses of the world, used to reach blindly themselves to the sky and a similar sun had loved.

Touching the Earth

"But look this is not yet
the other age
this is the only one
between the brown
pictures and the blank film..." – Merwin, from "Frame"







slender foot trail
along the Monona
very few walk
this morning and
the benches become
markers of age

those frames of ice
have crushed to the shore
and there you can
speak to them
even though we
are told not to

for a loneliness can
only come when
there are not others
when there are no
exhibits of the earth
and here are ancestors

as the sky looms
and the shoreline
calls and carries
us their lives back
to us by every
letter and live face

Still Enough Strangeness

"Pissing out the door of a cottage
in an after-squall wind before dawn
in the tame hill country of Wales,
farms everywhere, fences and hedgerows,
but still enough strangeness, precipitous
pastures, patches of wood shadowing
tangles of one-car-wide lanes,
to take you out of yourself for a time...
– CK Williams, from "Naked"




Far too many hours counted within
the house, the stagnant and ironic
air as the light outside all day long
has looked glamorously approachable,
as it had tangled itself up along
the beach tree roots at the terrace,
you turn on your thickest coat, scarf
and walk down the now tar dark street

where suddenly the shock to mind
comes, as porches flicker by motion
lights and the fuzzy green limbs
of Christmas trees poke out of corridors
well-wishing as they do by childhood
ornaments and the likely stars,
red as printed paint, at the very tip
of the thirsty frazier firs,

when it dawns on you, your feet
cooling now, face hardening, nose
red, that each house is world,
like you, that when you were ten,
you walked into strange living rooms
of friends, if even temporary,
and could see mother fold damp
clothes smoking a filterless cigarette.

High Windows

"By day we pace the many decks
of the stone boat
and at night we are turned out in its high windows
like stars of another side..." – Merwin, from "The Estuary"










here there is always a coming back to
shadow
here along the tangled spine of trail

we do not hide above the footbridge
which has laid over the swift
tongues of the November creek

the steepest sandstone cliffs
listen to our own echo as the walnut strikes
or the boot soles slide over morning ice

the saws of yesterday still sound to the other side of the hollow
and the last morning wren
colors the the gray air with its punctuated note

the tumble of the lost stone dumbly spreads
the car lights probe
nothing but the bald naming of hours

that cross this life

As One Blade of Grass

"What if I came down now out of these
solid dark clouds that build up against the mountain
day after day with rain in them
and lived as one blade of grass..." – W.S. Merwin, from "A Contemporary"











Long green hips of the bluff side fairways
we can run along them by winter
as the golfers have only left their spring dreams
and before you know it
it is of an original scene by eyes of natives
the corners of the blue river
in the distance would be the knowledge
of water near for encampment
the prairie along this way for hunting rabbits

walk in under the roof of a limestone cave
and we know we can hear mother's voice
emphatic that children complete their tasks
and here I am wandering alone
among the hillocks peering through old growth
hunting for the view of the three hawks circling
above thermals knowing my shadow as it flies off

Blue Bridge Inn

"I remember waking at the rivers
to see girders of gray sleepless bridges"

– W.S. Merwin, from "Traveling West at Night"










Even here, among the crowded seats of the Blue Bridge Inn, the roaring of jazz
pumping muscularly through the speakers at every corner,
I cannot think that it is in the circles of chattering people that I live;
the car that almost clipped the back end of my own on the way here,
flagpoles along the way, posted at front yards, spinning, wrapping,
signaling the things that the household supposedly stands for and those
things espoused by a montage of voices by the news radio in the car,
I see drift away as so much vapor by morning lifting from marsh;
and then I enter by dream, by memory, last spring bent over a thicket
on my denimed knees scratching over the cross thatched leaves,
the old and sometimes cut stems of honeysuckle trees or bittersweet,
the emerging pink lips of the dames rocket, invasives to be eradicated.
We pull. We toss to a clump. Neighors that are strangers walk about.
Down below a fresh springs bubble under a hand made boardwalk,
this was the place where the Winnebago moved among the savannah.
They walked along the creek and watched the green underwater grass
curl over the same original rocks as a water so clear as invisible,
cleanse and move on as the thoughts of the breathing buddha once did.