A Poem for a National Seashore
I. The Forests of Grief & Color
Perhaps grief is imagined to end in violence, as if grief itself could be killed. Can we perhaps find one of the sources of nonviolence in the capacity to grieve, to stay with the unbearable loss without converting it into destruction? If we could bear our grief, would we be less inclined to strike back or strike out? And if the grief is unbearable, is there another way to live with it that is not the same as bearing it?
Judith Butler, “On Grief and Rage”
This mycorrhizal network architecture suggests an efficient and robust network, where large trees play a foundational role in facilitating conspecific regeneration and stabilizing the ecosystem.
“Architecture of the wood-wide web: Rhizopogon spp. genets link multiple Douglas-fir cohorts” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2009.03069.x/full
… I will open my dark saying upon the harp.
Psalm 49
On a Day, In the World
We had a grief
we didn’t understand while
standing at the edge of
some low scrub hills as if
humans were extra
or already gone;—
what had been in us before?
a life that asks for mostly
wanting freedom to get things done
in order to feel less
helpless about the end
of things alone—;
when i think of time on earth,
i feel the angle of gray minutes
entering the medium days
yet not “built-up”:: our
work together: groups, the willing
burden of an old belief,
& beyond them love, as of
a great life going like fast
creatures peeling back marked
seeds, gold-brown integuments
the color time
will be when we are gone—
Whose Woods These Are We Think
(ekphrastic haibun)
When they ask “What are you working on now that the elements are finished” i say the elements are never finished; in China they have metal, in India they have ether, in the West we are short on time. Wood has also been named as an element. In white Euro fairy tales, children are sent into the woods, probably the Black Forest, carrying baskets covered with cloth made by child laborers just as factories are beginning. When i first read the Frost snowy woods piece as a desert child in the 60s, i experienced a calm as he enters the whose woods these are he thinks he knows, though i didn’t know that many woods in Tucson or a little horse thinking it queer or a village. What would it have been like to be sent out with a small covered basket if you were a peasant child into what we now call the ecotone, the region between two environments—a marsh with striped frogs for example—then on into the woods where a peasant uprising is being planned.
We have sent them all into the woods
We have sent them all into the woods
We have sent them all into the woods
& we know exactly whose thin logged-out woods these are. What do people need from poetry during the changes? The changes are immeasurable. Perception, form, & material locked into the invisible. Many need calm poetry, especially at weddings where they feel uneasy, & i would certainly write that way if i believed calm were key to any of it, but if what woods are left are lovely, dark, deep, they are also oblique, obscure, magical, owned for profit, full of fragile unnamed species, scarce on time, time that barely exists though people base their lives on imagining it does. i hoped to find some wisdom to send back to you & that is what i am working on now, my present hopeful wild & unknown friends …
All-night Crooked Moonrise over Mountain Pines
Scraping, on the horizon— & the disk
rose, throbbing, to the triple cloud—
the enigma responded: in the forest,
a wood mind swayed on the crest
while the angle brought ground water,
always a thin other, down
to the river … Through lace life, late life
light rises bent /// — you stand a while;
& if, at midnight, that raw moon
slashes your bed
through the cage of the blinds,
oh now the sweet owl
calls to its cripple
& hurries across the meadow
where t i m e is carried, tranquil & stretched
—— how can knowledge spread itself thus,
unable to sort itself out? & you might weather this:
you feared no one would love you
& when they did, you feared
you would not be forgiven
such a small word, time
yet it is friends
with both nothings—
The Bride Tree Can’t Be Read
The bride tree puts down its roots
below
