Because Yosemite’ s high altitude lake’ s
tadpoles wash up in
glow-in-the-dark condoms
and every fish lip has a hook in it. Because
there’ s bird shit
in the clouds. Things catch, get caught.
Things are consumed.
They told me there’ d be pain
so when I felt it,
sitting at my beat-up farm desk
that looks out glass doors
onto the browning garden — plain sparrows
bathing in the cube-shaped fountain
so violently they drain it,
the white-throats with their
wobbly two-note song
on the long way south still,
and our dogs
out like lights and almost
falling off their chairs
freed of the real-time for awhile
as time began for me
to swell, slow down, carry me out
of all this almost
to a where
After the cling of roots and then the “pock”
when they gave way
the recoil up the hand
was a small shock
of emptiness beginning to expand.
Milk frothing from the stems. Leaves inky green
and spiked.
Like blissed-out childhood play
turned mean
they snarled in tangled curls on our driveway.
A range of clouds banked up behind the peak
Of that apocryphal
Blue mountain, with a wide, oblique
Burst of late sun
Projecting at the east’ s receding wall
A film of what the day so far has done:
A wind that tries to scrape
The breaking waves up as they run
Across the bay
And shatter at the foot of Fluted Cape
In tern and gannet-printed veils of spray;
And trees the wind has caught,
Which seem too self-contained to sway
When they are blown,
And only move as a pleasing afterthought.
Impossible to wield
The acreage of the fabric that unfolded,
Slung from his shoulders like a crumpled field:
The distance from one Christmas to the next
When he was only seven
Was aching there; a foreign city flexed
Among the ripples; a face, the star-shocked heaven
About his flailing arms were shrugged and moulded.
Lulled in a nook of North West Bay,
The water swells against the sand,
Hardly more liquid than Venetian glass,
In which clear surface, just a little way
From shore, some four or five petite yachts pass
With languid ease, apparently unmanned,
Adrift along the day,
The great gold apples of night
Hang from the street's long bough
Dripping their light
On the faces that drift below,
On the faces that drift and blow
Down the night-time, out of sight
In the wind's sad sough.
I was playing in the street
no one paid attention to me
as I made forms out of sand
mumbling Rimbaud under my breath
once an elderly gentleman overheard it
— little boy you are a poet
just now we are organizing
a grass-roots literary movement
he stroked my dirty head
gave me a large lollypop
and even bought clothes
in the protective coloring of youth
I didn’ t have such a splendid suit
since first communion
short trousers and a wide
sailor’ s collar
Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize
go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust
you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony
be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important
5 am. One-quarter past.
Distant chimes inform me this.
A bell peal knells the mist.
And sunlight’ s
not yet bludgeoning.
But some light gets blood going.
Last night it was snowing
and now
every path’ s a pall.
Though mine the only footfalls
at this hour of awe. Above
hangs a canopy of needle leaf.
Below, the season’ s
mean deceit —
that everything stays
white and clean.
It doesn’ t, of course,
but I wish it. My prayers
