echoes crinoline and riding boots.
Emerging in the blaring sun, we blinked
And wiped our eyes; newborn, we tottered stunned,
Our bleary gaze toward the misted peak.
An easy climb through pine and aspen glades.
I watched the muscles flexing in her legs,
Her working buttocks tight within her shorts,
And heard her breathing deeply in thin air,
The quartz shards clinking with her every step.
When we reached the bristlecones, we paused
To ponder those tenacious trees, so gnarled,
But not eternal, no, yet nearly so
As anything on earth. The cones were bright
With golden honey, fecund, pregnant, ripe.
We ate our M&M’s in pinescent air
And sipped the lukewarm water from canteens.
Above the timber, scrambling through the scree,
We reached the cirque, the glistening our goal,
Then crunched through ice upon the glacier’s face,
And on the farther side, sat peacefully.
We’ll take the hike again, again, perhaps,
But someday we’ll just stay there, glacier-bound,
Side by side, thinking of the bristlecones,
The M&M’s, the water, and the scree.
Eudora (on having read One Writer’s Beginnings, by another Eudora)
In the sixth grade, Eudora Britton
Had budding bubs.
She wore rouge and lipstick.
She looked, I think, like Ava Gardner,
Hideous,
So repulsive that we boys stampeded,
Terrified when the teacher led her
Toward us across the gym for pairing,
To practice waltz and foxtrot.
I remember her full-lipped crimson smile
Above the sweater and the sagging bobbysox,
That Wonderland smile, fixed, immobile.
As she neared us, towed by Miss Hayes,
We giggled, milling in the corner.
The Deep Structure of Desire
If I say to you, “The log is ashes,”
You aren’t puzzled in the least.
You’ve known logs—known your father to chop them
For the black, wood-burning stove your mother used to cook the chili sauce in fall
(Ah, its redolence through the house!)
and to give the upstairs bedrooms
just a bit of heat,
just enough to keep you and Sister Beulah,
huddling together under the heavy quilts
your mother made, huddling there, the two of you together, in the bitter Mormon cold of January—
just enough heat to keep the two of you
not cold, not warm, but in a middle state
that made the huddling sweet.
And yet you should be puzzled.
For, my love and friend,
if the log is ashes it is no longer log.
Something which was the log is now ashes.
Here is another puzzle for you:
You, my wife, were born in Fairview.
But, love, when you were born,
you were not my wife—
though no doubt destined by our Mormon God
through eternity, you for me, me for you,
one couple indivisible, with no liberty and much justice for both.
Our language fools us.
Our moods are trout that sulk beneath
a log (which is not ashes) and then jump flashing
at a mayfly or a hackled hook.
Finish cooking the dinner.
But if it is not cooked,
how can it be a dinner?
The truth is hard to get at.
Here is a true-untrue story.
Our oldest son got lost in the mountains.
(Just Southern California mountains.
Not Alaska. Not that alarming. He told us
that the smog was bad.)
And so I’ll begin my story with
“Our youngest son got lost in the mountains.”
And you’ll say, “That’s wrong.”
So I’ll rephrase: “Our youngest son
didn’t get lost in the mountains.”
And you’ll say, “But that’s beside the point.”
And I’ll say, “Someone who is not our youngest
son got lost in the mountains.”
“Ah,” you’ll say, “now we can get on with the tale.”
So truth is not the exact opposite of untruth.
The truth is hard to find.
Or is it?
My sentences hide the truth.
That
