Green moss, green sedge. Green.
Not nature, not culture: just Mars.
Western sky deep violet,
Two evening stars, one white one blue:
Venus, and the Earth.
VASTITAS BOREALIS
The red rock and sand are all under water
that we ourselves pumped out of the ground
drowning what little we knew at the time
of this place as it was in the air
like gas burned off in a welder's fire
The whole world flicking before us like fire
tossing its orange flames into the air
that was not here at the time
we first stepped out on this ground
where everything is writ in water
NIGHT SONG
The baby cries out
I get up to check
He is still asleep
I go back to bed
So many hours
Spent like this
Awake in the night
The family asleep
Wife moves her leg against me
Wind pours in the south window
Rumble of distant night train
Crickets' vibrant electric chorus
Thoughts pulsing up and down
Mind ranging here and there
How many times
DESOLATION
Above the dip of the pass float clouds.
Sunbeams spray the skyline ridge.
White granite, orange granite,
Patches of snow. A lake.
Clustered in rocks,
Trees. Shadows.
The lake ripples its
Chill snow reflections:
Fish, breaking the surface.
Blooming circles on the water,
Why can't the heart grow as fast?
ANOTHER NIGHT SONG
Toss and turn in rumpled sheets
Hot but cold. Small pains
Smolder in the flesh.
Gears of the mind half-engaged:
The years grind jumbled and broken.
Regret, nostalgia, grief-at-nothing,
Grief-at-something, worry at this and that,
Anxiety without cause, confusion,
The past: remember? remember?
Shards of painted glass. Memory
Speaks in a language
You no longer understand.
The future you understand too well.
Pain in the knee, prescient
Sighs from the wife,
From the boys in their room—
With redoubled effort, sleep, sleep!
SIX THOUGHTS ON THE USES OF ART
for Pierre-Paul Durastanti and Yves Frèmion
1. What's in My Pocket
I remember during my year in Boston
I was walking alone at sunset by the Charles
The riverbank all covered with snow
The trees black spikes against the sky
The river's surface a glossy sheen
Cold hand thrust into down jacket pocket
I felt a book I had left behind
Title forgotten just a book any book
But suddenly all I saw was joy
2. In the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth
The passage when each section
of the choir begins to sing
a different song and the orchestra echoes
these parts or adds their own in a
thick fugue during which so many
melodies are being sung at once they can
only be grasped as whole sound it always
occurs to me Beethoven wrote
this music when he was entirely
deaf for him it was all just patterns
on a page he had to imagine the confluence
of voices singing in his mind he had
to be a novelist
3. Reading Emerson's Journal
“Grief runs off us
Like water off a duck"
Ah Waldo Waldo
If only it were so
But it is the verso
Grief seeps in us
Like a blotter takes ink
4. The Walkman
Running to Satyagraha
I saw a hawk soaring
and every turn every shift of its wings was
sung aloud in the sunny air
5. Dreams Are Real
The day passes into a book
For a time we are outside
Time at sea in an open boat
Rogue waves hit from nowhere
Cast into the next reality
Shackleton saw a wave so big
He thought it was a cloud
The boat rolled under and came
Up in a new world later
On South Georgia Island
Sleeping in a cave he leaped
To his feet shouting and hit
His head on the roof of the cave
So hard he almost killed himself
Dreaming of that wave
6. Seen While Running
Four birds in the air fighting
kestrel
magpie
crow
hawk
all involved spinning
in a brief spat overhead
CROSSING MATHER PASS
At the turning point of my life
I hiked toward Mather Pass.
With every step clouds thickened above
Until the world was roofed in gray.
Thunder rolled from west to east
Like big barrels over a floor
And as I crossed great Upper Basin
It began to snow.
Soon I walked in a white bubble
Slush piled on every rock.
Warm and dry in parka and pants
I felt my life fall away.
I gave it up. Fly away
On the wind, drift into slush,
I'll never go back! I quit!
Each step up was a step away.
A convex shattered slope of stone
Rose into mist. A boulder wall.
The pass on top, unseen. The trail
Swept up without a switchback,
Right to left in a single shot,
The Muir Trail crew's one touch of art.
It cost a life: I passed a plaque
And read the name: my own.
Then I was in the pass.
Flakes blew up one side and
Down the other. In the lee I tried
To eat but started shivering. Go.
With easy strides I clumped down
The white Ss on the northern slope
Until I saw the Palisade Lakes,
Far far below. The sun came out.
White lace on wet gold granite,
A new world, a new life,
A new world I'll make it new!
I passed two hikers setting camp.
Did you come over in that storm?
Yes, I said, I left my life on the other side
And now I'm not afraid.
NIGHT IN THE MOUNTAINS
"Or I can say to myself as if I were
A wanderer being asked where he had been
Among the hills: 'There was a range of mountains
Once I loved until I could not breathe.' “
—THOMAS HORNSBY FERRIL
1. Camp
Stream falling over rock:
Loud music. Night and a candle.
Halfway through this life:
It doesn't feel so long.
Ridges, cliffs, peaks, cols:
I'll never stop wanting them.
Ponds, meadows, streams, moss:
My knees number them.
Stars outside my tent door:
All my troubles as far away.
2. The Ground
Candleflame, minutes.
Pine needles, months.
Branches, years.
Sand, centuries.
Pebbles, millennia.
The bedrock, eons.
Me and broken sticks.
3. Writing by Straight
Can't see the words.
Waterfall a rope of sound,
Rushing about, pushed by the wind.
Trees black against the stars.
Dim blank white page.
I write on it and see a
Dim blank white page.
The story of my life!
Juniper, tent, rock, dark.
Wind dying. My heart
At peace. A Friday night.
The Big Dipper sits on the mountain.
My friends lie in their tents.
My back against the white rock,
Star bowl spinning overhead:
Feel the movement and soar away.
Who knows how many stars there are,
All those dim ones filling the black
Until it seems no black is there.
And then you see the Milky Way.
The sky should be pure white with stars,
That's black dust up there blocking the view,
Carbon just like us! All flung together through space
In just this way.
By starlight everything is clear.
Trees are alive. Rocks are sleeping.
Waterfalls, so noisy!
All the rest—
Quiet as my heart.
INVISIBLE OWLS
I remember our night on the ridge
I had seen a nook some years before
Flat sand and shrubs in broken granite
Right on the crest so I thought I could find it
And you were game for anything
We hiked up in late afternoon
Carrying water in our packs
Up in the shadow of the Crystal Range
Up shattered granite all patched with grasses
Until we stepped back into the light
We found the nook and pitched the tent
Between two gnarly junipers
The sun set in the big valley's haze
The light leaked out of the sky
We leaned against rock cooking our supper
And in the last electric blue
The richest color in all the world
We jerked at a flash in the air above
And jerked again as out of the night
Black shapes dove at both our heads
In the dark we could barely see them
Their quick dives made no sound at all
Too big for bats too quiet for hawks
We ducked it seemed at an onslaught of owls
Out hunting in a little pack
A strange disjunction of the senses
Wings baffled to damp their noise
So we heard nothing except the stove
Yet saw the steep black strobe approaches
The braking the sharp glides turning away
Then one came close we sensed the talons
I picked up the stove and held it aloft
A Bluet canister with blue flames burning
Bright in the dark blue expanse of space
Beyond it black wings flitting away
We laughed with just a touch of a shiver
Actually to be considered as food
Above the stars popped out all over
Netted in the Milky Way
And afterimages of blue flame
Then we lay in our blue tent
The moon rose and our air turned blue
A blue still in us
It will always be with us
All the color of the twilight sky
All the time and space we travel
The years pass so many now
Falling asleep owls twirl overhead
I feel the granite under our bodies
We soar in blue without a sound
TENZING
Tenzing did not speak much English
Hungry food tired rest
Paragraphs from a power in the land
Teahouse to teahouse he led us
Across land scored deep
Rivers in mountains no end to them
He arranged our food
He arranged our sleep
He showed us the way
Up the gorge of the Dudh Khosi
Green leaves leeches everything wet
Always within the monsoon clouds
One evening they cleared and there
Above the peaks above the clouds
Another range above the world
We walked up there
Namche Bazaar perched in space
Thyangboche Pengboche Pheriche
Up glacier canyons up their walls
Over ice and rock to Gorak Shep
Dead Crow the last teahouse
Dawn struggle up Kala Pattar
Sit on the peak necks craned up
To look at Everest
Massive slab bright in the sky
Sargarmatha Chomolungma
Mother Goddess of the World
Tenzing pointed at South Col
Fabled last camp littered with gear
Terrible stories corpses
Tenzing had been there four times
Portering up and down Khumbu Icefall
The sidewalk over the white abyss
Where any moment the world could crash
And end it all a place in other words
Beside Tenzing we do not yet know
The world and the icefall are the same
We see it in his face's Himalaya
Gleaming like ice in the sun
Windy he said South Col very windy
He was fifty-four
Later that morning Lisa got sick
He led her down by the hand
Offering tea sips of water
And brought us down to Pheriche
Helped run the teahouse while Lisa recovered
Helped the Sherpani who cooked all day
Led us to the ancient monastery
Showed us the wall of demon masks
Took us to Thyangboche in the rain
Made sure we saw the monks' mandala
Five men in red sitting and laughing
Over a circle of colored sands
Rubbing funnels with sticks
To free trickles of red green yellow blue
Intent then a joke and we three
Sitting with them through a dark rainy day
We sit there still in some inner space
He led us back down into the world
Down to Namche down down to Lukla
The little airstrip hacked into the wall
Of the gorge an outpost of everything
Led us into the Sherpa Co-op at dusk
Everyone in there watching TV
Powered by the Honda generator out back
A video of the Live Aid concert
Everyone stunned at the sight
Of Ozzy Osborne chewing up the stage
Tenzing the man who led us
Who took care of us who taught us
Finished eating and crossed the room
Crouched beside me gestured at the TV
America? he said
No I said no that's England
A REPORT ON THE FIRST RECORDED CASE OF AEROPHACY
for Terry Bisson
On my forty-third birthday I was nearly done
With Mars the drafts were in a shambles
Beauty in a novel (as in everything) is
An emergent property emerging
Late in the process and before that all
Is chaos and disorder but my hopes
Were high I felt that it was coming
Together I wanted the final push to be
The convergence of everything I wanted
Unreasonable things I had in my possession
Some bits of Mars a gram or two of the SNC
Meteorite that fell on Zagama Nigeria
In October of 1962 after thirteen milli
on years
In space little gray chunks of rock
Mounted in a necklace given to my wife
I unscrewed the casing took out a chunk
Climbed onto my roof at sunset
A clear day crows flying back
From the fields the coastal range dark
To the west gilt clouds above it
The vault still blue the wind fresh
From the delta and there I was
On the roofbeam of my house in the middle of
My life in the open air about to eat a rock
That if not fraudulent a piece of Jersey
Was an actual chunk of the next planet out
It felt odd even in the performance
I have never been able to explain
Myself but can only note that in the
Attempt to imagine Mars I came to see
Earth more clearly than ever before
This beautiful world now alive
With the drama of an everyday sunset
Black birds sailing east in lines
Under my feet my home the sun
Touching the coastal range I put the rock in
My mouth all went on as before
No electric shiver that the sunset itself did not
Provide no speaking in tongues I bit down
It was too hard to break in my mouth
Tongued it side to side tasted no taste
Ran it over my teeth a little rock
Most of it would pass through me
But the stomach's fierce acids would
Surely tear at the surface of the rock
And some few atoms I hoped would stick
As carbon incorporated into my bones
For their seven-year cycle or
For good perhaps and so I sat
Digesting Mars and the view the sun
Ablink through the Berryessa gap
The wind rising each life has its trajectory
Up and down in the shimmer of ordinary moments
Sudden euphoria stab of grief the pattern dustdevil
Funneling down spiraling up in most
Exquisite sensitive dependence
On unknown factors that dusk nothing of the sort
Happened it was a matter of will a
Meditative discipline exerted day after