Sunday, August 8, 2010

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.

Friday, August 6, 2010

with Oregon and August come many storms

With Oregon and August
come many storms
and brooding cloud-banks over high hills,
spread out west to our shore,
the last land,
the charnel grounds of the sun.

The thunderheads all hustle as far out
as they can over our poor city,
searching beyond the hills, beyond the ocean,
looking west as every lost soul does
when ambivalence digs in, real
for the first time.

The clouds in Oregon run the course
that set the pace for our ancestors to follow, first
in covered wagons with hollow hearts,
then in combat boots and backpack
bustling with collected notes,
hungry ghost of a script
that's to be written and then learned rote
and delivered, hands clasped
tight behind the lower spine,
pitch-perfect.

It is the song of all our time spent hoarding,
collecting and judging,
the song of every part of our lives
idly passed through too-easy boredom.
This yarn (spun of words pulled
from Mother, books,
graffiti on satchel, conversation,
nights
alone and waterfronts)
is the anthem of longing.
Our pioneer hearts weave it,
the red thread that connects all our artlessness in the morning,
when it first sets in (shocking
like the hothouse and then the frozen lake)
that you are alone and will be;
and at night
when the sorrow of a wasted day
wraps you up in a black
cocoon of dreaming.

Cavalier and lonely,
we are like the tall clouds
(they came first, and twist our ears
with bad weather and melancholy
when when we ignore them)
and we press towards the west
in a bedraggled but maddened
and maddening hoard.

Our hearts spawn in those
woods where the sun dies
and we push out West
to be born.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010