Interlude: Winter

Camassia is full of tiny ferns and bruise-colored leaves, and sudden shining mirrors have been inset in the hollows, waiting for gleams of sun. I could see chips fly from the woodpecker at his work, though I couldn't hear a sound.

The world is too large for me. I remember a time when I thought people got bigger, as they got older; but it turns out that the world grows much faster than we do. I dodge from cover to cover, like a timid vole, in the scant winter light, and I reach home with relief.

Fields of seablush and camas lily,fields we knew when the world was young.

And yet -- there at Oregon City, where Willamette Falls runs over the edge of the plate, and the river dodges between industrial buildings and power plant -- there is an older world implicit in it all, a world in which people were proud of what they built. Those people wanted their industrial buildings to be plain works of power. I'm confident that the thought that they were defacing the river never shadowed their dreams.

Clarification

Being one who wanted always

to prod the polish of a painting,

and prick myself on its stippled skin;

to bury my face in a fall of hair;

to lay my head, entraining

to the thin cotton and the nippled hint;

to thrust my fingers in the floral foam

to feel its dry and grainy clasp –

given all this ache and lapse,

tell me again, bring it home,

tell me how it happened that we alone

must carry the weight of our people's sin?

Degrees of Separation

If a heart lifts to the sky, and it does,
then what recoils? What do you recall?
the lipstick your four-year-old friend
insisted that you wear, the red cowgirl bandana
left on the floor because you cannot bend so far:

say this, or the swollen toes, the knees
red in their shallow dishes,
the neighbors' worry at
inadvertent trumpetings of pain
when you roll over in your sleep?

When I walk at night, pursued
by the close reasoning of the Moon,
how will I purge these from my thought:
the messages of fear and want,
letters delivered to me in the hope

that I might be the third or fourth or even fifth
degree of separation? I am not, I am not:
I am the seventh, eighth, ninth. I am
the dead-letter office of desire. Nothing
that comes to me

is going any farther.

Stonefly

The pikas shrill from their hay mounds;
the dry shift of the stonefly pounds
across that laboring lake of air.

We came to the high country quick this year,
holding the sky to our face like a mirror,
the lakes and the forests behind us. Turn

and the line of the sun swivels and whips

and burns against our fingertips:
slow down, give ourselves time to earn

the meadow silence above the trees,

the shivering blood in our unsteady knees;
we came to the high country quick this year.

May

It's in the moony nights of May
that Fear and Love come out to play;
Fear with his great head and ears,
Love with her glittering net of years.

Paw in hand and hand in paw,
they take turns touching on the raw;
for Love hunts softly, like the owl,
but Fear prefers to bay and howl.

Out beyond the glimmering dark
they twirl each other in the park,
Fear in boots stamps out the beat
before Love's bare and noiseless feet.

Camas Lily

Camas Lily, Camassia Quamash, Wikipedia

We will not speak yet of calamus,
nor of the death camas, white
and lovely. We might glance
at quamash, which is what
the Nez Perce called the root:
but our business today is the lily.

You may have seen that blue before.
The skin of a split plum, aside
from the red gash where the wasps
jack slowly in ecstasy, will show
just that eyeshadow blue:
the well-used lips of a woman
of a certain age, falling 
contentedly asleep
may show the same. It is a blue
towards which neither lake 
nor sky aspires. Deeper than those:
the color of a bruise.

It flowers in the season
of resurrection, like a true lily.
The camas, however, is never true:
it is oblique, slanting across 
page and meadow,
an italic asterisk of spring: it says
there is more, more than you know.

You don't harvest its roots in spring,
but you visit its fields when it is in flower,
which is when it is easy to spot 
the white death camas in among the blue,
and weed them out. (But we are not going
to speak of the death camas yet.)
And if you are Nez Perce, Cree,
or Salish, you will return in Fall,
to dig and pit-roast, or boil.

But if you are, like the wasps,
a late-comer, and a feeder on
fruits that were not meant for you,
you will wander bewildered
in violet blue fields that shimmer
and are crossed and crissed
with the violent green of swallows;
you will wonder what all this bounty means,
knowing only that it is not meant for you.

Fields of seablush and camas lily,
fields we knew when the world was young.

Light-Spattered Hem

I love my particular sin 
of inappropriate lust
and immoderate liking.
It has saved me from just
such a roundabout rout 
in the service of gods:
I was hardly tempted, 
against such bleak odds,
to throw. My friend 
hands back her vows
after searching inquiry: 
I never take them. It cows
me, but it's right, and 
my own tradition of wild men
in the forest or the tavern
is a light-spattered hem:
as close to a robe 
as an eye that's caught by any dress
should ever try to knot across 
its wanton emptiness.

To Windward

How lovely a woman is, who

not finding something in her purse, pauses

puzzled, and tilts her head while the light

washes sideways. Something begins to tap

or to roll, and the restaurant heels.

Its sails fill on the other tack: she

makes a decision – the medicine

was left on the counter at home, perhaps,

or her daughter made off with the hairbrush –

it is this ordinary world that I do not want to leave

and it is not that she knows I saw her

or that the wave of light, breaking over me

will leave anything steady or true.

No. The click of the clasp as she closes

her purse, it ticks in my fingertips,

and I want to say, “Don't go.”

Film

That strange old man, he came today
he knelt in a peculiar way
the toes uncurled and sliding out
I wondered if he had the gout.

He has the bloated whiskry throat
the eyes that swim and peer and float
and when he doesn't have to pee
I think that he's in love with me.

It's odd that knobby hands that shake
can be so deft and wide awake:
pare the film from off his mind
and you could swear that he was kind.

I Was Better At Forgiving

I was better at forgiving 
before I knew how much they'd take:
the words out of my mouth,
the plum out of my cake.

They will take my daughter's
daughter's Christmas snow;
they will take the words grandmother spoke 
for sky and stone and bee;
they will take the bees themselves from home,
till hive and honey, wax and comb 
are scholars' curiosities.

I will never say "I love you" meaning
what I alone would mean:
no, I will make claims
I have no right or strength to make, 
or else I will exclaim,

"I like you very much, 
and I hope that you will thrive,
than dead I'd very much 
prefer that you're alive."

I was better at forgiving
when I thought that I could choose;
I was better at forgiving
before I knew that I could lose.

The Remedial Class

I think my task now is to go back home, and fully inhabit it. Not to go flitting off on pilgrimages, crossing strange streams and collecting curiosities. Not to set out to found a Utopia in some far away, unspoiled (until I got there) place. 

No, to inhabit this place, right here, among these people, where we find ourselves now: not because we are perfect, but because we are here. To paint our own houses and plant our own gardens and help our own neighbors. To deal with our own maddening people; to sort through our own garbage. I do not want to live cloistered, in any way. I want to open my heart here, in these dingy, despairing suburbs, under these skies roped with power lines, among these scattered, straggling douglas firs -- these stunned survivors of destroyed forests. Just here.

I of all people to say this! -- I who have been so good at running and hiding. But it is the remedial class that needs to study hardest. When Martha said, "what good is Buddhism if Buddhists behave like this?" -- she says it was terribly useful to her that I said, remember, you come to a church or a temple, not because you're spiritually healthy, but because you're spiritually wounded, because you have a sense of just how bad it is. This isn't the advanced spiritual class, it's the make-up class. These people came together out of their sense of lack, out of their sense of missing something.

Likewise. Not because I know how to stay at home, but precisely because I don't.

Not Satin

My erotic imagination doesn't run to satin. Not enough drag for the fingertips: not enough depth of field. Give me a flannel nightgown, or a worn-to-transparent tee, any time. Give me a faint down, body hair I can see distinctly only in the corona, when an elbow eclipses the sun, but which tickles, tickles faintly, a spiderweb whisper before the cold-to-warmth of real touch. (Real! Get out.)

I don't want slick or smooth. Not, at least, until it is well-earned: warmed and sweated from within. I don't want an Eros who is glib, who knows what to say. I want one who stutters and loses his place. I want an awkwardness of desire that drives beyond capacity. A strangled baying, not a little-girl lisp. I want to be struck and scratched. By accident. I am not looking for tableaux, however pretty. Not my thing. No: no satin, not for me.

Fields of seablush and camas lily;
fields we knew when the world was young. 

Kraken

The outer edge of each curve is a clear if faint shifting line: the inner edge fades imperceptibly. And it all vanishes before it has risen higher than a woman's hand. 

It goes on rising, unseen: the scent comes to my nostrils. Coffee. But this terrible weariness weighs and weighs. No sleep touches it. Can this be age? There is no refreshment here: only a staving off. I rise to the surface more slowly, each time. I am more waterlogged, more densely built, less hopeful, every time; my horizon is more bounded, my spirit more petulant. How could any god even get purchase on this slippery, sodden mess, let alone lift it up?

I am huge and old, huge and old: a kraken who imagines it has some appointment with the sky. Delusional. I mistake my own monstrous coils for ghost riders: the shudder of my gills makes the skin of the water twitch for miles roundabout. The higher I rise, the lower the pressure, the giddier I get. All these years I told myself stories about the sun. Now a smear of caustic white, burning the enormous glassy darkness of my eye, informs me that I had left out the most important fact: it burns.

Fields of seablush and camas lily;
fields we knew when the world was young.

Restless Leg Syndrome

The evening winged like an ant,

frantic and ill with the burden of flight

and a desire – unfamiliar –

for things beyond its light.

An ill and an expensive sleep,

all twitch and haul and fling,

shadowing, shouldering on

the discontent that mornings bring:

the second skin rolls off in flakes,

the wings drop off the chain,

the large head is aching then;

the six thighs crawling with pain.

Fields of seablush and camas lily;
fields we knew when the world was young. 

Camas Lily

Fields of seablush and camas lily;
Fields we knew when the world was young.