But on the Earth

"At this hour I remember everything and everyone,
vigorously, sunkenly in
the regions that–sound and feather–
striking a little, exist
beyond the earth, but on the earth. Today
a new winter begins" – Neruda, from "Madrid (1937)








I read Abbey again and want nothing more than to be driving along a dusty trail passing the wind carved arches and wondering, there, could I get beyond my fears?

I read a Merton journal entry. Of January. It is cold at the Abbey. He observes men cutting wood and considers his mortality that morning as he sees new creases under his eyes, and suggests "a new hollowness" forming. He is tired of war and words.

I read something of eco criticism. Of post-humanism. What will we love as nature loses all of its facades. The arches have. The eye of the prophet has. I see the arches as woman? Can I?

Neruda's poem is a splash of language, dripping along the contours of Madrid, '37, much death to come, as Orwell said, a fresh militiaman, an odd new shadow had formed over the people of the city.

The first day we arrived in Sedona, jet-lagged, my eyes tight, lungs full of wrong air, we began walking over the mammoth lobes of Bell Rock outside of the village of Oak Creek. Ghosts upon ghosts, we walked over the clay colored rock, a dusting of sand over every crack. Parades of little cairns like still fires lined along the trail, or what we interpreted as such. We bent down to our knees in order to propel up onto the mantle of the rising rock. A new blue fire formed at the cracks of the split rock. The lobes had been planted below every perch had disappeared this high up. We looked over the highest crack. Nothing below. Stomach disappeared, as though it had dropped down through the body and onto the ground.

One desert jay in the distance
a flood of blue
beyond fear

This is Only Our Survival

"My nice voice is reserved for meetings with a view, my palm
outstretched saying here. Are our problems. Legacies rolling out like multicolored marbles. Don't focus so much on the 'doom and gloom' they keep saying. We don't want to depress. Everyone. This is only our survival." – Kathy Jetnil-Klijner, from "Nice Voice"









Forget to Smile

Some days spent in the Arizonan red rocks will do this to you. Those red cakes, from a distance, luxurious, 'decorated up well,' a tour guide tells us. As though planted, sculpted, and of course they were both. It doesn't take much to wish for those hands. Fight it back, not supposed to be religious, just spiritual, is that correct? These would have been invisible, my hands. Straight up from a sodden sand I suspect, fingertips pulled accurately along the edges of the eruption, soft enough to contour to the liking. Of it. Of what. Clipped finally at the top, flat and nearly predictable, something that they eyes of ours latch onto, all eyes, from the scorpion on up to the native, all wisdom, you can't kill wisdom. Those days spent walking hungrily along the provided lobes flat enough to survive your step. Little gradual steps, similar to how we might come to love, but forget. Red heart, yes, pulsing we climb, as we lose our own, a world arrives again. People in the city sleep behind everything.

Then descend back into the city, it's own arid hush. Snow had done something nice for us. Animated the grisled yards tortured by freeze and dehydration. First white powder down must have been religious for all the rest of them. Call it castles if you must. Crystals I shovel. Ear buds in. New to touch. I sculpt lines along the sidewalk, clear the driveway to an open mouth, place little piles of snow down like a potter with shovel. Might melt in an hour. I use it as a tool. The sun itself. A tool. Cars that pass are quieter. Most everyone inside buildings along the corridors of business disappear into the sky, alive, eyes burning up white, climb, friends.


for tomorrow
you will forget
to smile

Unquiet Stones

"In the wave-strike over unquiet stones
the brightness bursts and bears the rose
and the ring of water contracts to a cluster
to one drop of azure brine that falls."
– Neruda, from "In the Wave-Strike Over Unquiet Stones"









The silent mouths of rocks no longer.
I have seen her, the paintress, who watches
out of her own window at the turret
of her studio how the crest of coffee pot mountain
stands at the distance
under the spectre of sunshine drench
and turn those canyons to tongues.
She walks shyly back to her canvas
and considers the permanence of the rose
splattered hues, the cork splattered
wash of the sandstone, decibels and wonders,
how to pluck the cord of color to music.
Somewhere out there the desert jay breaks
for its own wonders under the pinyon tree
crouched down into a crease of the peach lobes
and her mind turns to the love of stone
and her fingers fly from one swollen dash
to another and thought strikes
that no one has ever known or will know again
here is where the river of the soul resides
as stone and bird and tongue.
We live inside a dream of our original eruption.
A cosmos vibrates. An eye never dies.
The stone will always sing.

Mirror of Flesh

"Crude dove, clay piggy bank,
on your grieving back a sign, something
that barely deciphers you. My people,
how–shouldering your sorrows,
beaten and subdued – how did you manage
to accumulate naked science?"
– Neruda, from "Pottery Shop"







The last of the lonely eagles–
silhouette of brown fire erupts
from the corner of the window so close
as to fill its squared artificiality,
a frame of such thin space between the eye
and the lofty corpuscles of flight,
and I follow by binocular lens as I can
up into invisible thermals that that lift of the brown back,
that fold of perfectly dabbled
feather by a flight that is as much magic
as it is circling tension.
Alone now to the top of the peak of the river cotton wood
alone now for the night
as the pewter dust of sunset
settles to the surface of the bay,
the eagle watches, surfeited,
hungry, veins pulsing by a new torsion of blood,
heart as thin as the air
or a pane of glass between
the love march of the ages
and two eyes that cast forever
these mirrors of our own flesh.

The Bluebird Diaries

"Trolling the coho fly twenty feet behind the boat,
under moonlight, when the huge salmon hit it!
And lunged clear of the water. Stood, it seemed,
on its tail. Then fell back and was gone."
– Raymond Carver, from "Cutlery"









Same old haunts of beauty.
There are days that I feel I live by the promise of prairies.
It doesn't matter the weather –
some will complain of ninety degrees
and muggy by August,
when, these days, it rains for a month at a time.
Others, by winter, too cold,
how could you go out hiking on ice!
I see prairies in my mind all the time.
Bald spots left on the earth,
so few left, as some man sitting
behind some desk somewhere considers
options to buy, sell, at least encroach.
I see them there as something like shining relics.
Archeologists in Chile have found
the largest thigh bone of any dinosaur,
having sat there right under the surface
for thousands of years, now blown
by the wind and surfaced.
I imagine walking along a slender trail
used by the Incas and seeing
the nub of a bone the size of my fist
only for it to reveal an object larger than myself.
The mind scans back over years as best
as it can, places in details, thinks of evolution,
how the skies have fluctuated,
strange gasses risen and the birds
learned to navigate swirling conditions.
That is the same as prairie.
Those old settlers saw it as gold.
Scythed away at it. Built fences, drug horses,
in one day perhaps dug
out a large band of lead plant, prairie smoke,
milkweed drenched for the love of monarchs.
Could it matter? Unlike the Incas
they were new to the place.
In my mind I stand in the middle of a rising
hillock somewhere in the middle
a prairie which here holds two oak.
This isn't me anymore.
They eye sees the circling of the hawk,
like a silhouette of flagging ash
up through the rising creeks of those oak limbs.
That isn't me anymore.
I stand still as can be and block out the highway
traffic which passes the man's
new development.
A breeze passes through me.
and lands like words on a page.

Ship of Winter

"Through fortuity, at the crisis of errant skies,
you reunite the lives of the sea to that of fire,
grey lurching of the ship of winter
to the form that love carved in the guitar."
– Neruda, from "March Days Return with Their Covert Light"







Hours by January Shores


Wait by the hour at the shores of winter
and the thousand gods of light, no longer in favor,
might disappoint and the fresh gleaming
of natural fractals do retreat and the mind knows it.
Deepen the cold, light or not, but bald
shore that had once left the thin waters
where only the guppies swam and jumped
to scratch the skin of the lake, the stream,
this great and grand serpent of river, like a dream
now has thickened a skin and sits there
as a moon, white, cratered, believable,
my own eye's replacement for three months' life.
To come to love the ice is a sight scanned
from within, as thought soothes the amygdala,
as the pathways that search, themselves rivers,
form new and pulsing oxbows of synapses,
turns the hardened quarters of back coves
again to the bright slivers of a whitened eye.

Winter Readings

"It might be that horses would be useful
On a snowy morning to take the trail
Down the ridge to visit Steve or Mike and
Faster than going around the travelled road by car."

– Gary Snyder, from "Fence Posts'








Mostly we walk in the shadows of previous work.
Find myself wondering nearly daily:
what was it like to hang those beaver pelts
up in the rafters in my grandfather's basement –
remember that ancient musky smell of gut and dirt?
It was down there that he made his own shotgun shells.
Lead pellets mixed with grease another smell.
Old wood of damp stairs, mallard feathers,
see the land and work with the hands.
Callouses as proof of living.

It's easy to see the same thing this morning
as we walk right up the edge of a bluff,
this old quarry road black asphalt for all that machinery
to roll up and down daily to get to the limestone
riches above.
It happened. The trailers and trucks, the backhoes,
all linked, one job in mind for years and no one
said a word – 'need the aggregate for the roads' –
while all the while the hawks circled the thermals above the power lines.
Take the judgement out; take out the questions,
take away the invisible images of the soul of the cliffs
that they pounded and chewed at for years
with those shiny silver teeth
and you gain the eye of the work – the eye of rock.

Some nights our man lay down a fire up there.
Look around at your work. Piles of limestone detritus
pushed off to the edges of the site,
that's how it will look forever. Another sip of whiskey.
Maybe a wife and three kids at home, maybe nothing.
Blue sky fading to a moonlight that now casts
out apparitions along the cut cliffs,
brand new shadows of this earth. Had to have been
flattened birches, long white glowing lines
among the silly piles. Take another sip. Smoke a cig.

Good work? Two years time. Good pay. Eye of rock.
When a grandparent tell them all of the highways you helped.
Driving yourself you look at the rip rap along
hundreds of miles of country roads
where mailboxes tip at entrances to long box houses.
Dead barns behind those. Bluffs behind still roll.

Later we'll watch a few TV shows ourselves
put on a game of uniformed athletes of some sort.
Look out the window. Manicured world.
The eye of rock still inside pulsing like an owl's
or any animal for that matter, for that's where
we used to crawl ourselves.
Feels like a scar on the dream of this world that quarry.
We fall in love with what's gone.
That man up at that fire knew a little something.
But not enough.