In truth each day is a universe in which
we are tangled in the light of stars.
Stop a moment. Think about these horses
in their sweet-smelling silence.
RENÉ CHAR II
What are these legitimate fruits
of daring?
The natural brain, bruised by mental
somersaults.
On a bet to sleep naked
out in the snow.
To push your forefingers into your ears
until they meet the brain.
To climb backwards into the heavens because
we poets live in reverse.
It is too late to seduce the heroine
in my stories.
How can enough be enough
when it isn’t?
The Great Mother has no ears and hallelujah
is the most impossible word in the language.
I can only say it to birds, fish, and dogs.
XMAS CHEESEBURGERS
I was without Christmas spirit
so I made three cow dogs,
Lola and Blacky and Pinto,
cheeseburgers with ground chuck
and French St. André cheese
so that we’d all feel better.
I delivered them to Hard Luck Ranch
and said, “Chew each bite 32 times.”
They ignored me and gobbled.
The world that used to nurse us
now keeps shouting inane instructions.
That’s why I ran to the woods.
MARY THE DRUG ADDICT
Mary, spayed early so a virgin like her ancient namesake, is a drug addict. She was stomped on as a puppy by an angry little girl and thus a lifetime of spinal problems. Now an old woman she waits for her pain pills every day and then she’s a merry animal. Up until a few years back she’d run much farther than her Lab sister until she was a tiny black peppercorn in the alfalfa field. She walks much closer now turning to check if I’m following along. She’s an English cocker and sniff s the ground then pauses to meditate on the scent. To understand Mary we have to descend into the cellar, the foundation of our being, the animal bodies we largely ignore. She sleeps a lot, eats kibble without interest and craves meat tidbits with the pleasure making her wiggle. Outdoors, her eyes wide to the open she acts with exuberance, our lost birthright. Like all beautiful women she has become beautifully homely. In the evening I lift her onto the couch despite her brush with a skunk, and we speak a bone-deep language without nouns and verbs, a creature-language skin to skin.
NIGHT CREATURES
“The horses run around, their feet
are on the ground.” In my headlights
there are nine running down the highway,
clack-clacking in the night, swerving
and drifting, some floating down the ditch,
two grays, the rest colorless in the dark.
What can I do for them? Nothing, night
is swallowing all of us, the fences
on each side have us trapped,
the fences tight to the ditches. Suddenly they turn.
I stop. They come back toward me,
my window open to the glorious smell of horses.
I’m asking the gods to see them home.
DEAF DOG’S BARK
A bit flinty. Trace of a squeak.
Does she hear herself?
“I hear only my own music,” said Beethoven.
Is it an announcement or warning
from one so small and crippled
in youth by a child
who stomped her spine?
She listens to the glory of her past.
She knows where she is
in our home. She’s Mary,
the deer chaser, a woman
of power, a lion in her mind,
roaring so weakly into the dark,
trying to make hips follow chest.
JUNE THE HORSE
Sleep is water. I’m an old man surging
upriver on the back of my dream horse
that I haven’t seen since I was ten.
We’re night riders through cities, forests, fields.
I saw Stephanie standing on the steps of Pandora’s Box
on Sheridan Square in 1957. She’d never spoken
to me but this time, as a horse lover, she waved.
I saw the sow bear and two cubs. She growled
at me in 1987 when I tried to leave the cabin while her cubs
were playing with my garbage cans. I needed a drink
but I didn’t need this big girl on my ass.
We swam up the Neva in St. Petersburg in 1972
where a girl sat on the bank hugging a red icon
and Raskolnikov, pissed off and whining, spat on her feet.
On the Rhône in the Camargue fighting bulls
bellowed at us from a marsh and 10,000 flamingos
This night-riding is the finest thing I do at age seventy-two.
On my birthday evening we’ll return to the original
pasture where we met and where she emerged from the pond
draped in lily pads and a coat of green algae.
We were children together and I never expected her return.
One day as a brown boy I shot a wasp nest with bow and arrow,
releasing hell. I mounted her from a stump and without
reins or saddle we rode to a clear lake where the bottom
was covered with my dreams waiting to be born.
One day I’ll ride her as a bone-clacking skeleton.
We’ll ride to Veracruz and arcelona, the up toVenus.
POET NO. 7
We must be bareback riders. The gods
abhor halters and stirrups, even a horse
blanket to protect our asses is forbidden.
Finally, our legs must grow into the horse
because we were never meant to get off.
A PUZZLE
I see today that everyone on earth
wants the answer to the same question
but none has the language to ask it.
The inconceivable is clearly the inconceivable.
Bum mutter, teethchatter, brain flotsam,
we float up from our own depths
to the sky not the heavens, an invention
of the murderers. Dogs know the answer
by never asking the question but can’t advise us.
Here is the brain that outran the finish line:
on a dark day when the world was slate
the yellow sun blasted the mountain across
the river so that it flung its granitic light
in the four directions to which we must bow.
Life doesn’t strangle on ironies, we made
that part up. Close after dawn the sheep next door
leave their compound, returning at twilight.
With the rains this was a prodigious green year,
and now the decay of autumn sleeps in dead comfort.
Words are moving water — muddy, clear, or both.
RUMINATION
I sit up late dumb as a cow,
which is to say
somewhat conscious with thirst
and hunger, an eye for the new moon
and the morning’s long walk
to the water tank. Everywhere
around me the birds are waiting
for the light. In this world of dreams
don’t let the clock cut up
your life in pieces.
DAN’S BUGS
I felt a little bad about the nasty earwig
that drowned in my nighttime glass of water,
lying prone at the bottom like a shipwrecked mariner.
There was guilt about the moth who died
when she showered with me, possibly a female.
They communicate through wing vibrations.
I was careful when sticking a letter
in our rural mailbox
, waiting for a fly to escape,
not wanting her to be trapped there in the darkness.
Out here in the country many insects invade our lives
and many die in my nightcap, floating and deranged.
On the way to town to buy wine and a chicken
I stopped from 70 mph to pick up
a wounded dragonfly fluttering on the yellow line.
I’ve read that some insects live only for minutes,
as we do in our implacable geologic time.
INVISIBLE
Within the wilder shores of sky
billions of insects are migrating
for reasons of sex and food,
or so I’m told by science,
in itself as invisible as the specters
of love and death. What can I see
from here but paper and the mind’s
random images? A living termite
was found on sticky paper at 19,000 feet.
Perhaps she thought she had lost
the world as I think I must, barring
flora, fauna, family, dogs, the earth,
the mind ground of being as it is.
A few years back I began to lose
Rüppell’s vulture was seen at 36,000 feet
for reasons the gods keep from us.
MARY
How can this dog on the cushion
at my feet have passed me
in the continuum of age, a knot
in our hearts that never unwinds? This dog
is helplessly herself and cannot think otherwise.
When called she often conceals herself
behind a bush, a tree, or tall grass
pondering if she should obey. Now crippled
at twelve, bearing up under pain
on the morning run, perhaps wondering
remotely what this is all about, the slowness
that has invaded her bones. Splayed out
now in a prone running pose
she moves in sleep slowly into the future
that does not welcome us but is merely
our destiny in which we disappear
making room for others on the long march.
The question still is how did she pass me
happily ahead in this slow goodbye?
REMOTE FRIENDS
Yes, in the predawn black
the slim slip of the waning moon,
the cuticle of an unknown god,
perhaps Mother Night, the outline
of her back between points of stars,
she’s heading south toward Mexico
preferring mountains, rivers, oceans, jungles
that return her affection for earth.
It’s been hard work to guide migrating
birds for 150 million years. To her
we’re newcomers, but then she married
me, a stranger whom she’s worn thin as water.
POET SCIENCE
In my recent studies I have discovered cancer.
Last year it was the language of birds
and the year before, time by drowning a clock in the toilet.
It is life’s work to recognize the mystery
of the obvious. Cancer is a way the gods
have learned to kill us. In numbers it’s tied
with war and famine. Time is the way
our deaths are numbered precisely. The birds
and their omnipresent language, their music,
have resisted conclusions as surely as the stars
above them which they use for navigation.
I have prayed willingly to their disinterest,
the way they look past me into the present,
their songs greeting both daylight and dark.
They’ve been on earth fifty times longer than us
right down to the minute, and they’ve told me
that cancer and time are only death’s music,
that we learned this music before birth without hearing it.
Like cancer cells we’ve lost our way and will do anything to live.
My mind can’t stop its only child so frightened of the dark.
ACHE
All this impermanence and suffering
we share with dogs, bees, crows,
the aquatic insect that lives but a single
minute on a summer evening
then descends to its river burial,
perhaps into the mouth of a trout
already full of its brothers and sisters
while in a nearby meadow the she
wolf approaches an infant elk
she’ll share with her litter.
Many of us live full term never seeing
the bullet, the empty plate of hunger,
the invisible noose of disease.
We can’t imagine the rings of the bristlecone
that lived for millennia. We cut it down
to number the years like our own insolent birthdays.
ORIOLE
Emerging after three months to the edge
of the hole of pain I arrange
ten orange halves on a stiff wire
off the patio between a small tree
and the feeder. Early next morning
five orioles of three species appear:
Scott’s, hooded, Bullock’s. Thinking
of those long nights: this is what agony wanted,
these wildly colored birds to inhabit
my mind far from pain.
Now they live inside me.
BLUE SHAWL
The other day at the green dumpsters,
an old woman in a blue shawl
told me that she loved my work.
RIVER I
I was there in a room in a village
by the river when the moon fell into the window
frame and was trapped there too long.
I was fearful but I was upside down
and my prayers fell off the ceiling.
Our small dog Jacques jumped on the sofa
near the window, perched on the sofa’s back
and released the moon to head south.
Just after dawn standing in the green yard
I watched a girl ride down the far side
of the railroad tracks on a beauteous white horse
whose lower legs were wrapped in red tape.
Above her head were mountains covered with snow.
I decided we were born to be moving water not ice.
RIVER II
Another dawn in the village by the river
and I’m jealous of the 63 moons of Jupiter.
Out in the yard inspecting a lush lilac bush
followed by five dogs who have chosen
me as their temporary leader. I look up
through the vodka jangle of the night before,
straight up at least 30,000 feet where the mountains
are tipping over on me. Dizzy I grab the lilacs
for support. Of course it’s the deceitful clouds
playing the game of becoming mountains.
Once on our nighttime farm on a moonlit walk
the clouds pushed by a big western wind
became a school of whales swimming hard
across the cold heavens and I finally knew
that we walk the bottom of an ocean we call sky.
RIVER III
Saw a poem float by just beneath
the surface, another corpse of the spirit
we weren’t available to retrieve.
It isn’t comforting to admit that our days
are fatal, that the corpse of the spirit
gradually becomes the water and waits
for another, or perhaps you, to return
to where you belong, not in the acting
of a shaker sprinkling its salt
everywhere. You have to hold your old
heart lightly as the female river holds
&nbs
p; the clouds and trees, its fish
and the moon, so lightly but firmly
enough so that nothing gets away.
RIVER IV
The river seems confused today because it
swallowed the thunderstorm above us. At my age
death stalks me but I don’t mind. This is to be
expected but how can I deal with the unpardonable
crime of loneliness? The girl I taught to swim
so long ago has gone to heaven, the kind of thing
that happens while we’re on the river fishing and
seeing the gorgeously colored western tanagers and the
profusion of nighthawks that some call bullbats,
nightjars, and down on the border they call them
goatsuckers for stealing precious milk. I love
this misfiring of neurons in which I properly
understand nothing, not the wild high current
or the thunderstorm on which it chokes. Did the
girl swim to heaven through the ocean of sky?
Maybe. I can deny nothing. Two friends are mortally
ill. Were it not for the new moon my sky
would collapse tonight so fed by the waters of memory.
RIVER V
Resting in an eddy against dense greenery
so thick you can’t see into it but can fathom
its depth by waning birdcalls, hum of insects.
This morning I learned that we live and die
as children to the core only carrying
as a protective shell a fleshy costume