"The Relatively Unproductive Chaparral" \ Riprap

Nancy:  I never looked at a Manzanita and saw BTUs, but after hearing a neighbor suggest that we could solve our waste disposal problem by sending it on rail cars to the Grand Canyon...

“The Relatively Unproductive Chaparral”

                                                                            Keuster, Davis & Bagby

                                                                                                     Nature 2/23/84

Passing into, passing through,

hunkered under the Manzanita,

expectant of birds, I love the chaparral,

chaparral between me and the desert,

chaparral between me and the mountains,

chaparral between me and the sun.

And I love the life of the chaparral,

the wings in the chaparral,

the wild black bees in the chaparral,

the pungent sweet honeycombed chaparral

humming in the sun.

Industrious America!  Biomass!

The new chaparral, the ground-up, spit-out

feedstock/chaparral, the diesel fuel factory

between the desert and the mountains.

I loved the old and shining Manzanita,

the old days, wild and wasted days,

thunder and sun in the chaparral.

Alan: When I first read the series of haiku-like segments in Paz’ “Piedras sueltas,” it inspired me to try something similar using his headings, although not quite as compressed and with a seventh section that gives up entirely on the form.

Riprap

                  After Octavio Paz, “Piedras sueltas”

                    

1.     Flower

Rain-washed, polished by passing feet,

it’s all one to these stones.

Except here, at one side, these two give up their embrace

and part forever for this flower.

2.     She

She was a cat, an owl, an oasis,

a call that brings longing in the night.

As she was all shapes, no one guessed

as she drained through the stones, her death.

3.     Biography

It came and went so swiftly.

He held it all and it shattered.

A long time on his knees

cutting his hands on the pieces.

4.     Bells in the night

All day burning with sun,

now ice of stars and moon too old to rise.

I have waited here, waited

until at last the stones start ringing.

5.     At the door

I blink at the wind-whipped courtyard.

What do you all want?

Behind me silence, my own walls.

Threading the cobbles the million ants.

6.     Vision

He became everything at once.

A harrier quartered the lowest sky.

A mouse sprinted agonized among the blades.

He never found a way back to himself.

7.     Landscapes

Stones scale the slope, lifted on each others’ shoulders

and burst in waterfalls, glimpses

of armor hidden among trees.

Arrows, green feathers or the wings of mountains.

All the hills lift high in the shrill air

and circle away to the west.

Birds the color of sunset beat down as splintered rain.

We fear the storm as storm, as fear.

We slip, are carried downward,

as dead leaves, dead stems eddy together for comfort.

Cookie Fortune \ In The Bleak Mid-Winter

Nancy:  Cut loose from the future, a victim of fast-fading red ink.

Cookie Fortune

^   The ones that clearly were intended

for someone else at the table.

Those you can toss into the rice bowl,

laughing.

^   The ones that you read thinking,

if only I’d gotten this before my last

car, job, man, it is so right!

^   The ones that you read, clear your

throat, roll up into a little ball and

toss into the rice bowl while turning to

the person on your right and applauding

his/her excellent good fortune.

^   The ones that you slip into your wallet

and take home and add to the small fluttery

pile in the corner of a drawer.  Not you,

maybe, me, my little collection of papery

promises.        Just a joke.      Really.

#    I am going to tell you a terrible thing.

Until I opened the drawer this morning I

was witty and wise, admired, steadfast and

destined for fame.  Romance was mine and

fortune was on its way.  Until I opened the

drawer.  Until I saw the carefully smoothed

slips of blank paper, their messages degraded

to nothing more than faint discolorations.

I’m wiped out.  All my fortunes, all my futures

were written in fugitive ink.

Alan: How did Ryokan get through the winters in his little hut?  How do we get through our own harshest weathers, when it seems we having nothing left to sustain us?

In The Bleak Mid-Winter

Day after day it snows

filling the path

drifting high against the walls

of my hut.

Nothing to eat but old roots:

the mice and I hungry, hungry.

I’ve seen no one for weeks,

not even the sun peeping in.

Dying now, I won’t be found ‘til Spring.

Tayatha om: this is how it is:

burning my poems

to make one small flickering fire

after another.

In Memoriam \ New Year's Dawn

Nancy: Children play at this, letting their twigs race downstream.  Even as I dropped my broken bits into the currents and eddies, I was aware of racing to a new place, a new potential.

In Memoriam

I broke a stick into small pieces,

one for each year,

and dropped them into the stream.

They caught in an eddy and turned,

foam caught at them, the bark, the broken edges,

and then in a quick slide they went under the bridge.

What did I expect?  That they might knit

miraculously?  That I might go home laughing?

When I turned they were slipping downstream

pulled apart, jumbled, the way the years go,

here and there one catching the light.

Before I left, I drank, the water still tasting of ice

and now of the thrusting green shoots upstream,

and then I turned for the house.

A roof there, four walls.

My legs were tired and I had a long way to go.

Alan: While revelers sleep it off, I’d rather start the new year at daybreak.

New Year’s Dawn

Here

at the northeast corner of the country

at the east edge of the time zone

the light comes early, leaves early.

Half-past five.  Already

the air brightens to the southeast,

sculpting that long line of mountains

that grows each night from the sea

and dissolves again each day.

There, beyond the fields and scraggy woods,

beyond the barely perceptible, gentle

true horizon,

there they are once more

heavy and distant

and the arms of the sun behind them

reaching up to embrace

the cold, recumbent sky,

the still sleeping year.

Stopping By Woods \ Cold Night Old Friend

Alan:  My seventh grade English teacher declared that I would be “my generation’s Robert Frost” because of some doggerel or other I’d handed in.  It was an off forecast, but perhaps the following is a long-delayed response to that burdensome prediction.  “Plow,” by the way, means a snowplow.

Stopping By Woods

Meeting Ryokan on a back road

late, one glum afternoon

(he was staring into the trees,

their clotted flanks,

snow flecking his cloak like dandruff;

the grind of a plow approaching from the distance,

and more forecast),

he looked at me, grinned:

“No promises.

Nowhere to go.

No interest in sleep whatsoever.”

Nancy: So little difference – a hut in the mountains, a cabin by the sea – and the quiet that is filled by a thought, a smile, the snick of an ember.

Cold Night Old Friend

Before I had the door open

Ryokan was talking . . . and I

was tired of the cold and went

down to the city but oh

the flapping of paper . . . bells

on every corner . . . something

awful, the little drummer boy . . .

He sighed and pulled a bottle of wine

out of his robes.  We didn’t need

to talk, just put another log on the fire,

it blazed up, just you, me, Ryokan, and

now and then the tkk of a falling coal,

waiting out the longest night.

Ryokan's Night Journey \ Yaqui Well

Alan: We are blessed with our night sky – one of the last places along the east coast of the U.S. where you can still see stars by the thousands - although light pollution now smears the horizon here and there.   How many stars, how many constellations, must Ryokan have seen!

Ryokan’s Night Journey

                 “If someone asks my abode I reply: the east edge of the Milky Way.”

Over his hut the stars.

What did he name them? how shape his sky?

Night after night, winter, summer, watching:

dip, turn, rise, vanish.

Were there beasts, hunters?

Rice paddles, plows?

Or were they stones, way-marks?

On a night this cold

did Ryokan take his stick

and ascend through snowy woods?

Those bright ones, hanging there –

were they a question? or a path?

Nancy: The “well” was nothing more than a pit deepened every night by coyotes.  To the coyotes we owed the small grove of trees, the chattering flock of birds, the broken shards of pottery that showed us the past.

Yaqui Well

From here you can see the waterhole.

No one comes but the birds,

no one laughs,

no one kindles the fire,

no one pours from the dripping jug.

It is broken.

They killed the pots,

killed the tools,

tore down the shelters of brush

and burned everything.

Everything was gone,

the coyote songs, grandfather songs,

the first man and first woman,

the beginnings

and slow steps on the sacred ways.

The circle was broken.

The only path left led to the end of things.

They killed the pots,

and took the path of unsanctified bones.

The water is a sweet secret in the ground.

Coyotes come in the dark, and dig.

Ryokan Under The Great Circle Route \ the animals

Alan: Ryokan has come into our poetry in many different guises.  For me, he often leaps unexpectedly through time and space, hopscotching “normal” existence, a sort of Zen poet Dr. Who.

Ryokan Under The Great Circle Route

Ryokan watches the contrails

spread across the stars

under the moon above Mt. Kugami.

Portents of a future

glowing and fading in the dark.

Too content to sleep,

he takes his brush, writes: “In the void of no-being,

all things are.”  With five quick strokes

draws moon,

mountain, three lines across the sky.

Nancy: I wrote this after hearing a news item about the siege on National Public Radio. 

the animals

                                          Sarajevo, 1993

zoo under siege

keepers at first

ran the gauntlet

bent double

food for the beasts

dodging bullets

the beasts

were old friends

had no nationality

but war is insatiable

war ate the food

war ate the keepers

the beasts ate the trees

even the bark and roots

even the dirt

one another

ate even their young

even their mates

today

the great bear

died of starvation

except for the mortars

the zoo is quiet

unless you happen to hear

ghosts

or wind

in the rubble

a voice saying

leave this planet

while there is time

Driving Route 127 \ Always Seeking The Growing Tip

Alan: David Kresh once wrote a poem that quoted, as an epigraph, Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s wonderful “Bright moments, bright moments, bright moments, right now."   Here’s a “bright moments” poem from the road.

Driving Route 127

Occasionally there are moments

traveling a perfectly ordinary stretch of road

topping a perfectly ordinary low rise

to glimpse between the upraised arms of trees

a perfectly ordinary small hill

floating above an implied but unspecified

minor valley

the heart spasms itself so happily tight

you could die now, and should,

making of this a final vision

and grace.

Why then must we keep going over

and down the once again

imperfectly dull miles

knowing our real death waits

patient and banal

to flag us as we round some future

unremarkable blind curve?

Is it we so desire

just another such moment and another,

or suppose that to pause in one

will trip this coherence instantly to decay,

or fear that our minds will hurry forward regardless

leaving our bodies stupidly for all to see

forever dumbstruck and agawk?

Nancy: If you suppose that the following hints at some argument with certain small magazines that mistake the merely fashionable for the truly creative, you’d be right.

Always Seeking The Growing Tip

Hidden behind a cushion

of epidermal tissue, behind tough

expendable cuticle, the active

meristematic cells do their thing.

Which is: to penetrate, to pierce,

to pry, to make a way through grit,

to thrust through rubble, to crack stone;

to suck, to sip, to eke.

All this in the dark, even

rejecting light, tropic,

these cells, this growing tip,

to gravity and elemental stuff.

Elsewhere, coteries form and dissolve

around umbels, around corymbs; much

is made of this panicle or that,

even of ephemera, that have one

– only one – day in the sun.

In the dark, the growing tip is always pushing,

always ready to differentiate; if you are seeking

the growing tip, never look where it was yesterday.

It will have gone, on;

always look in new ground.