6.19: alta peak. early start. bear at panther gap. peeks out from behind a hedgerow. clap hands. "go on bear!" ten seconds later it changes its mind and bolts across the trail twenty feet in front of us.
meet a backcountry crew. they invite us to stretch with them. such are the humors of long days without contact with the outside world. one time a trail crew competed to see who could reach an inflatable caterpillar placed in the middle of an alpine lake while riding a blow-up dolphin and using a stick as an oar. passing hikers called it in thinking something was amiss.
(a recurring announcement in the sac airport is to report any suspicious activity or luggage left unattended)
sign the logbook at the summit. tried to get a signal. none. relief and worry. one drops away after a few moments.
6.20: four bears today. kept a sequoia seedling and pressed it. several acorn woodpeckers. mountain chickadees. "chick a dee". "chick a
dee". first note is high, the second two descend a fifth.
is that you saying something to me? i'm positive i can communicate with you thru them. can you hear me?
halfway thru a general sherman ipa. undisguised and naked at wolverton. warm rock, hot sun. glacial polish. wash off the day's work in mountain water. dappled shade of lodgepole pines. a burnt out husk of a ponderosa. water skeeters. i think of whitman's naked bathers. would he like what saw if he saw me? i open myself for the earth. for the memory of walt's eyes. that old perv. welcome the sun on skin that doesn't see the light normally. slip back into the water. it hurts to be so fervently cold at first. the breath leaves you. goosebumps radiate over the body. then relax. then back onto the hot smooth rock. the dirt and the water commingling in rivulets over my chest. bright skin. where is a tongue when you need one?
a thought today: what if I just didn't leave? didn't. park service would pay for lodging and food thru the end of september. I'm coming close.
i write these words looking west over visalia at 7000'.
vernal equinox tomorrow. new moon yesterday. of stars.
6.23: hermit thrush singing for twenty minutes this morning.
6.24: need to check out Hanshan. was wished easy transitions yesterday. i know what she means today. spent the night in sac. bright clean. constant music. intermittent announcements. comings and goings of the nameless. only two nights ago i slept with a spotted owl for company.
this seems like a descent.
6.28 sure enough. seattle. i walk to get coffee. i'm lost. the birds aren't talking to me. the squirrels don't make sense. i will not see a bear today. and there is nothing watching for me from deep inside the woods.
there is only the hum of cars outside my window.
mountain time and city time are not the same.
i hold the last piece of clothing not washed to my nose and smell the pine and the smoke and the magic.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Exhale
Torn out of time.
Thuja boles buttress mercury skies.
This our music: frantic flowers
shedding petals even as they
bloomed. Your feet wet with
dew covered in them. Me kissing
them clean. Laughter.
Even now sapphires turn in the mud.
The prodigy of our genius is this:
We have been made redeemable in love.
And the vespers of sweat made last in the
mind much longer than on the skin.
Thuja boles buttress mercury skies.
This our music: frantic flowers
shedding petals even as they
bloomed. Your feet wet with
dew covered in them. Me kissing
them clean. Laughter.
Even now sapphires turn in the mud.
The prodigy of our genius is this:
We have been made redeemable in love.
And the vespers of sweat made last in the
mind much longer than on the skin.
Monday, June 4, 2012
A Tree Telling of Orpheus by Denise Levertov
White dawn. Stillness. When the rippling began
I took it for a sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors
of salt, of treeless horizons. but the white fog
didn't stir; the leaves of my brothers remained outstretched,
unmoving.
Yet the rippling drew nearer — and then
my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if
fire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips
were drying and curling.
Yet I was not afraid, only
deeply alert.
I was the first to see him, for I grew
out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest.
He was a man, it seemed: the two
moving stems, the short trunk, the two
arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless
twigs at their ends,
and the head that's crowned by brown or gold grass,
bearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird,
more like a flower's.
He carried a burden made of
some cut branch bent while it was green,
strands of a vine tight-stretched across it. From this,
when he touched it, and from his voice
which unlike the wind's voice had no need of our
leaves and branches to complete its sound,
came the ripple.
But it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and
stopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me
as if rain
rose from below and around me
instead of falling.
And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling:
I seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know
what the lark knows; all my sap
was mounting towards the sun that by now
had risen, the mist was rising, the grass
was drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them
deep under earth.
He came still closer, leaned on my trunk:
the bark thrilled like a leaf still-folded.
Music! there was no twig of me not
trembling with joy and fear.
Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.
He told of journeys,
of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,
of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day
deeper than roots…
He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,
and I, a tree, understood words — ah, it seemed
my thick bark would split like a sapling's that
grew too fast in the spring
when a late frost wounds it.
Fire he sang,
that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
As though his lyre (now I knew its name)
were both frost and fire, its chord flamed
up to the crown of me.
I was seed again.
I was fern in the swamp.
I was coal.
And at the heart of my wood
(so close I was to becoming man or god)
there was a kind of silence, a kind of sickness,
something akin to what men call boredom,
something
(the poem descended a scale, a stream over stones)
that gives to a candle a coldness
in the midst of its burning, he said.
It was then,
when in the blaze of his power that
reached me and changed me
I thought I should fall my length,
that the singer began
to leave me. Slowly
moved from my noon shadow
to open light,
words leaping and dancing over his shoulders
back to me
rivery sweep of lyre-tones becoming
slowly again
ripple.
And I in terror
but not in doubt of
what I must do
in anguish, in haste,
wrenched from the earth root after root,
the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder —
and behind me the others: my brothers
forgotten since dawn. In the forest
they too had heard,
and were pulling their roots in pain
out of a thousand year's layers of dead leaves,
rolling the rocks away,
breaking themselves
out of
their depths.
You would have thought we would lose the sound of the lyre,
of the singing
so dreadful the storm-sounds were, where there was no storm,
no wind but the rush of our
branches moving, our trunks breasting the air.
But the music!
The music reached us.
Clumsily,
stumbling over our own roots,
rustling our leaves
in answer,
we moved, we followed.
All day we followed, up hill and down.
We learned to dance,
for he would stop, where the ground was flat,
and words he said
taught us to leap and to wind in and out
around one another in figures the lyre's measure designed.
The singer
laughed till he wept to see us, he was so glad.
At sunset
we came to this place I stand in, this knoll
with its ancient grove that was bare grass then.
In the last light of that day his song became
farewell.
He stilled our longing.
He sang our sun-dried roots back into earth,
watered them: all-night rain of music so quiet
we could almost
not hear it in the
moonless dark.
By dawn he was gone.
We have stood here since,
in our new life.
We have waited.
He does not return.
It is said he made his earth-journey, and lost
what he sought.
It is said they felled him
and cut up his limbs for firewood.
And it is said
his head still sang and was swept out to sea singing.
Perhaps he will not return.
But what we have lived
comes back to us.
We see more.
We feel, as our rings increase,
something that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest
leaf-tips
further.
The wind, the birds,
do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.
The music!
I took it for a sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors
of salt, of treeless horizons. but the white fog
didn't stir; the leaves of my brothers remained outstretched,
unmoving.
Yet the rippling drew nearer — and then
my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if
fire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips
were drying and curling.
Yet I was not afraid, only
deeply alert.
I was the first to see him, for I grew
out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest.
He was a man, it seemed: the two
moving stems, the short trunk, the two
arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless
twigs at their ends,
and the head that's crowned by brown or gold grass,
bearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird,
more like a flower's.
He carried a burden made of
some cut branch bent while it was green,
strands of a vine tight-stretched across it. From this,
when he touched it, and from his voice
which unlike the wind's voice had no need of our
leaves and branches to complete its sound,
came the ripple.
But it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and
stopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me
as if rain
rose from below and around me
instead of falling.
And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling:
I seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know
what the lark knows; all my sap
was mounting towards the sun that by now
had risen, the mist was rising, the grass
was drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them
deep under earth.
He came still closer, leaned on my trunk:
the bark thrilled like a leaf still-folded.
Music! there was no twig of me not
trembling with joy and fear.
Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.
He told of journeys,
of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,
of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day
deeper than roots…
He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,
and I, a tree, understood words — ah, it seemed
my thick bark would split like a sapling's that
grew too fast in the spring
when a late frost wounds it.
Fire he sang,
that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
As though his lyre (now I knew its name)
were both frost and fire, its chord flamed
up to the crown of me.
I was seed again.
I was fern in the swamp.
I was coal.
And at the heart of my wood
(so close I was to becoming man or god)
there was a kind of silence, a kind of sickness,
something akin to what men call boredom,
something
(the poem descended a scale, a stream over stones)
that gives to a candle a coldness
in the midst of its burning, he said.
It was then,
when in the blaze of his power that
reached me and changed me
I thought I should fall my length,
that the singer began
to leave me. Slowly
moved from my noon shadow
to open light,
words leaping and dancing over his shoulders
back to me
rivery sweep of lyre-tones becoming
slowly again
ripple.
And I in terror
but not in doubt of
what I must do
in anguish, in haste,
wrenched from the earth root after root,
the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder —
and behind me the others: my brothers
forgotten since dawn. In the forest
they too had heard,
and were pulling their roots in pain
out of a thousand year's layers of dead leaves,
rolling the rocks away,
breaking themselves
out of
their depths.
You would have thought we would lose the sound of the lyre,
of the singing
so dreadful the storm-sounds were, where there was no storm,
no wind but the rush of our
branches moving, our trunks breasting the air.
But the music!
The music reached us.
Clumsily,
stumbling over our own roots,
rustling our leaves
in answer,
we moved, we followed.
All day we followed, up hill and down.
We learned to dance,
for he would stop, where the ground was flat,
and words he said
taught us to leap and to wind in and out
around one another in figures the lyre's measure designed.
The singer
laughed till he wept to see us, he was so glad.
At sunset
we came to this place I stand in, this knoll
with its ancient grove that was bare grass then.
In the last light of that day his song became
farewell.
He stilled our longing.
He sang our sun-dried roots back into earth,
watered them: all-night rain of music so quiet
we could almost
not hear it in the
moonless dark.
By dawn he was gone.
We have stood here since,
in our new life.
We have waited.
He does not return.
It is said he made his earth-journey, and lost
what he sought.
It is said they felled him
and cut up his limbs for firewood.
And it is said
his head still sang and was swept out to sea singing.
Perhaps he will not return.
But what we have lived
comes back to us.
We see more.
We feel, as our rings increase,
something that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest
leaf-tips
further.
The wind, the birds,
do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.
The music!
Friday, June 1, 2012
sometimes staying home is like a vision quest.
you don't always have to go up a mountain, or travel
vast distances to meet the world as it really is. you can still fast,
go without water if you want to. have morning coffee though,
if you normally.
be gentle. be vigilant. meet the careening armies of
your past with great strength (it's there), with wildflowers in your
hair and hands. employ all the animals you know - bears, rattlesnakes,
owls, cougars, wolverines, bumble bees, crows, ants -
on your behalf. let them carry banners pronouncing,
"not here. not anymore. you may not remain here".
they will. you are loved. so much it's a matter of life and death.
it will seem strange. it will seem like you don't deserve it. you do.
but don't look to be liked. don't look for answers. or sources.
don't want to be healed. or be over this. keep very careful watch
on the soft ground you've cordoned off. and then don't.
the trick, at first, is being able to let things close, right up
to your line-in-the-sand
without letting them in. they'll eventually lose interest.
but they won't disappear. a breakthrough is to find that
you don't want them to. it would be an augur that something is amiss.
they should come back from time to time. that's perfectly normal.
they're part of you after all. welcome them. then dissolve them.
another breakthrough would be to see the world through them.
at will. with unbounded compassion. that is one definition
of 'unbounded compassion'. another is to expect no thing.
and always remember to keep admiring the birds.
you don't always have to go up a mountain, or travel
vast distances to meet the world as it really is. you can still fast,
go without water if you want to. have morning coffee though,
if you normally.
be gentle. be vigilant. meet the careening armies of
your past with great strength (it's there), with wildflowers in your
hair and hands. employ all the animals you know - bears, rattlesnakes,
owls, cougars, wolverines, bumble bees, crows, ants -
on your behalf. let them carry banners pronouncing,
"not here. not anymore. you may not remain here".
they will. you are loved. so much it's a matter of life and death.
it will seem strange. it will seem like you don't deserve it. you do.
but don't look to be liked. don't look for answers. or sources.
don't want to be healed. or be over this. keep very careful watch
on the soft ground you've cordoned off. and then don't.
the trick, at first, is being able to let things close, right up
to your line-in-the-sand
without letting them in. they'll eventually lose interest.
but they won't disappear. a breakthrough is to find that
you don't want them to. it would be an augur that something is amiss.
they should come back from time to time. that's perfectly normal.
they're part of you after all. welcome them. then dissolve them.
another breakthrough would be to see the world through them.
at will. with unbounded compassion. that is one definition
of 'unbounded compassion'. another is to expect no thing.
and always remember to keep admiring the birds.
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