Midnight Sky (Imagining the Ponderosa)

I miss the winter sky.
I miss my midnights crowned
by crystalline Orion's belt
that Ginsberg loves,
that stretches from home to Oregon.

Snyder and I lived and wrote in the same place
and both struggled
both loved Ginsberg
both looked at the empty
Portland sky and found only Orion.
The winter is watched by mortality, by blind Jesus,
hung up by fingers,
palms and knobby toes, defeated
benevolent and blind.
Those ancient mica flecks
that stud the black granite
of the western sky in
Hades night
outrank our Jesus,
outrank Orion. But
if any legend can be true,
they shone a grim portent,
that sky-flung belt of three stars; a red thread
connecting a birth
and death,
the palm-read line of petty fate,
that destined, curving course read rote
and laid bare in palmistry, in art
(the stars).

For who are these men,
dangling from invisible wires
in the dampened blackmold rafters;
hung
from plank like pine,
like ponderosa?
How do they compare to a field
of yarrow, sage, and bittersweet sorrel? How
do their words, their life-spun stories
surmount
the moon shining full like a dewdrop,
full like an egg containing sparrow,
sperm, hummingbird
rabbit?
Their wisdom rests on shallow
mountains,
absorbed like dry dust into the waiting
horns
of the mountain goats--fodder for shofar
--and nests in their capricious
brains; adorns
the tops of the leery juniper
bushes and holes under the flatrock
dens of scorpions.
Their wisdom never leaves
those breast mountains,
those sloping hillocks like
nipple and aureole,
that earth/Mother body.
Their words are not blown out
of the decapitated horn of the ram
or written down on papyrus,
birch-bark, vellum,
tincan or gold.

Their words are absorbed by the ponderosa.
Their words are covered in moths.
Their words are wordless
and can only be heard in silence.