Prayer from Gray’s River

Prayer from Gray’s River

When a mother kills the light in her son’s eyes
god moves stone like water for miles
and ash rains for months.

I collect mudstone from a bleached river bed
exposed by floods that come
most winters. I build

a cairn on my window sill. If I leave
the cairn sit memories leach
away so sometimes

when I’m strong I take a piece and taste the grit.
The last time I admonished Jack
I can’t recall my words

but under a glaring sun, I see his flushed cheeks,
his sweat-matted hair brushed back. I see
tears as he watches me

instruct him to work harder with the same eyes
that challenged his mother. It’s not like
I’m going to die!

he vowed two nights before she drugged him and
drowned him with a pillow.

The memory is unlithified--I return it
gently--undo only the slightest
flake with my breath.

(previous draft: click here.)

Reading Heinrich's "A Year in the Maine Woods"

Build a nest-level blind in a maple tree.
Clear shrubs near seep for a pond.
Cut brush for a view of the mountain
or for a grassy bank down by the brook.
These naturalist memoirs seduce us
as the authors themselves are seduced
by a shiny new purpose--an old apple orchard
returned to the sun--brewing coffee on a stove
fueled by hardwood you limbed, hauled, sawed
and split. Honest about midges and horseflies,
but seductive the way washing your car is not.
Unless you don't have a car
and you hear Sheryl Crow and it's sunny
and the hot is softened by a pretty steady breeze
blocks inland but still smelling of Sound.

The Black Sun

The Black Sun

1.
I sit far back from the center where people walk
their strollers and throw frisbees. Depending on what
the wind is saying I sit in or out of the late afternoon sun.
A small pool beside me collects coins. My focal point
is a big round polished piece of black granite,
an obelisk rolled upon itself glazed and lumpy
like a chocolate donut. It must have arranged my chair.
I survey the orange and red flowers in rows,
the reservoir, the redwoods, and after each in turn
I’m returned to Noguchi's Black Sun.

2.
Back a second hotter day I take the same chair.
The fountain is raucous. I smell chlorine in cool
mist when the breeze shifts. A woman spreads
a towel on the green lawn. She rolls up her shorts
and kicks off her sandals. I guess she's near Jack’s
age if he were here. Broader views contain more
bare shoulders and frisbees and trees, but the black
stone fills the same still space within me. You ask
me to say goodbye to Jack--an act of kindness--
a happiness project. I know your request is rhetorical.
Shadows track the listing earth day by day around
the sun. Jack is far away and moves as the sun
moves. If he could hear me would I say goodbye?

3.
My chair is occupied when I finally get here.
A neighborly lecture on street side parking
soured my sour mood. The lawn has browned.
The sun not the sculpture selects my new chair.
I seek relief in shadows from other people.
Blocked by a tree what does the Black Sun say
now? Last night I had two dreams. Jack is young.
We are on an ocean liner. Jack falls over the side;
I jump in after. In the other he wants to explore
dark and narrow steps leading underground. I fear
the dank cramped space--no room to turn and find
the sky. Don't go far, I say. I fear I won’t follow
when his fears awaken and I hear Papa? And towels!
To keep him clean! He wants five—I let him take three.
In my goddamn dream! The Black Sun is a ridiculous
metaphor for what it is like for years to lose your son.
It is cold and dead. Through its aperture, I can’t see
Jack's ashes on Hurricane Ridge. There is a reason
why mountains appear blue and blur in the distance.
Color disperses, contrast softens, background bleeds
through, and blue, blue light comes faster.

Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet’s mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason. - Czeslaw Milosz's Nobel Lecture

We need a bigger Sun

We need a bigger Sun

That was still when wires were small,

I tell my absent son. Before the walls

were alive with things. The refrigerator

slept when yogurt was low. The displays

didn’t listen for your tongue’s double click.

The power lines grew thicker until no poles

could raise them. They lined the streets

like maples and in the plants turbines grew

feeding our need to communicate. Now

it takes all the energy of the sun to teleport

just one ounce of you within this universe

and avoid the windshield of a passing car.

How much do you tip a mariachi?

A butterfly settled on the salty lip

The sun behind it boomed

I found myself in a flight path

The margaritas bounced

and for what seemed like days
the tables flitted this way and that

The mariachi bowed

and I bought them drinks

The sun behind them boomed

I am a sentimental drunk

She twirled a paper parasol between her lips

I brushed salt from them with mine

Corona

Corona

Tambora erupts and smears chrome yellow all over.
The sun blurs behind storm clouds.
Yellow wind froths waves, and foam
tumbles across the expansive canvas.
Rocks are yellow. Cottage windows are yellow.
Palm trees are yellow because green costs too much.
Still beneath the horizon the moon is round
and palpable like pain. I lick its often shadowed face
which turns through every phase to me.
Near enough to block the sun, the moon
casts the jetting corona in yellow light.
I can’t disobey its blunt insistence over every thought.
Look! The sun hasn't abandoned you.



Thanks to E. Bishop's "Write it!" demand from One Art. And Sierra Nelson.