Of Countrymen in August

Whenever we worked at the creekside shed
there was always something else to do
such times as we were stumped, or nails ran short,

or the sun reached round the fir and baked us down
from raftering, roofing, or the like. We leaned,
gossip-like, against the fresh framing

of the walls and sipped solar tea,
watching the edge of a cloud's long skirt
chase the neighbors' horses leisurely

across their pasture, down the camas swale
and up the other side, against a bold backdrop
of maple-shrouded hills. The horses liked

to amble down to our corner, stand and watch.
We couldn't cure them of the shies,
though we might try with handfuls

of slick green grass, or a few choice
coaxing words. They'd check us out:
first one black blink from behind

the forehead blaze, and then another,
cocking their long heads round to see
our self-assured,  predatory faces, eyes front,

gazing on them, horse-flesh accountants
by their reckoning. Their flanks
would shiver, and their forefeet stamp,

scoring the earth in a language built of weight.
Some movement then would always start them off:
a silvery chisel hefted, or water bottle sloshed,

spattering sun. They'd hammer away up the swale.
Lovingly we'd watch them go, coveting
our neighbors' lands and all that lived thereon,

as country folk in August always do.
 
 
 

Meteor night

is near the end of the second week
of August. They spread an ancient carpet on
the grass and sweep it clean, then roll it up

till after the first dew falls. Friends come,
with food and vacuum bottles, blankets, pillows,
sweaters, and good cheer, staking out

places on the viewing ground as at
a neighborhood picnic after games. The guests
are scented each with lavender, sage and mint

where each one's passing brushes through the beds
to spice the air, darkening now, as sunset
drains away from Jasper Mountain's scree.

A screen door bangs continually as small bodies
hurtle in and out of interior space.
Tea and coffee make their rounds, and someone

says: "There's the first star." Vega,
usually, unless it is an especially
planetary summer. One of the young ones

knows his sky better than his elders do,
and walks them through the brighter stars,
small arm sweeping the great ecliptic:

"This is Regulus; the red one is Antares;
And that is Altair." They tell him they like Altair
best; fire so hot it looks a point

of ice dropping to where the golden sun
went down. "Oh, look," shout others sitting near.
Some are too late; they tell them what they saw.

A spark has overrun an arc of sky
from the fence corner, beyond the neighbor's cows
and faded out above the chimney tops.

They settle in to a long evening's work,
appreciating what bright shows
these small stones make, thumping into air,

all as it were to entertain frail creatures
hardly less ephemeral than themselves.
 
 
 

The press run

She'll choose two cans of ink, and explore them
for the soft caramel of good set, putting aside
flakes of air-dried dross with her inking knife.

One, a can of orange stuff, she's been given
for imprinting brew-pub six-packs; the knife
scoops up a dollop and ferries it to the disk.

The other is your standard black; the smallest
bubble of this she'll add to the orange, and stir,
in hope of a decent brown. A heave of the flywheel

begins the inking-up: the disk turns a bit
with each revolution of the wheel, and the ink,
smashed paper-thin by rollers, spreads evenly

across its face, painting it, painting the rollers,
as her foot pumps the treadle, and her face
admires, as it always does, the view from here,

of garden dressed in straw, of mountain air
training the rainbow windsock northward,
of Jasper Mountain becoming a hill of gold

in the sunset. Gathering the furniture, reglets,
quoins, quoin key, and the new magnesium cut,
she locks the chase, fastens it to the bed, turns

the press, this time with impression lever on,
and lets the cut kiss the clean tympan paper
with an image. Around this image she places quads,

tympan bales, and bits of makeready, and prepares
the stacked sheets to be fed from the feed board
into the maw of the Chandler & Price, known

to pressmen for a hundred fifty years as the
Hand Snapper. She reaches for the radio's knob.
Rachmaninoff? Damn. Oh, well, turn

wheel, pump treadle, lean forward, lean back,
click-click, click CLACK, work-and-turn,
deliver the finished sheets to the delivery board,

admire mountain, lean forward, lean back.
Rachmaninoff gives way to Mozart's glorious
forty-first symphony, and Jasper Mountain

gives way to night, and in the black window
a woman in her  fifties, leaning forward,
leaning back, critically appraising the music,

the printing, and herself, click-click, click CLACK,
sour bones and a game leg but a job well done
and the Mozart's Mozart. Four hundred sheets

later, and well into Bruch, the wheel stops,
the chase is unclamped, the disk and rollers
washed up, and rags canned. The reflected

window-crone lifts a sheet of work
to the light, examines impression and matter.
Reaching to silence Bruch, she sees the stilling

silhouette of the rainbow windsock:
it waits for dawn and a fair and lofting wind.
 
 
 

Normandie

He sleeps now much of the day, the Florida visitor,
conserving life, its slight thread thinning out.
His head slumps back in the big plush chair, and the eyes

that so much hurt him close in shallow rest.
The children want to watch TV. I must
distract them, blunt their cheerful noise somehow.

A book is near my hand, filled with sumptuous
paintings of old ships. I open it, disclosing bronze rams
built by war-minded Rome, and clever upwind sailing

of Spanish merchants, or the knife-sharp lines of swift
tea and opium clippers, the murdering squat shapes, end-on,
of the cold grey battlewagon fleets of the Great War.

Speaking quietly of these things, I gently open out
the folded center, the book's masterpiece: a cutaway view,
in rich red and black, of a classic long-hulled liner.

I remember having read this was an unlucky boat,
yet knowing nothing of the particulars, only indicate,
admiringly, its intricate design. The big chair stirs;

the clouded eyes swing briefly into focus. A voice
comes clear: "I was on that boat the day she sank."
We gape at him. "Yes, I fought ship fires in New York

that year, in a suit, white asbestos, spaceman-like.
The ship, they said, was hit by saboteurs. We tried
to save her, but she settled sullen in Harbor mud

Lettuce in winter

The potting room was a miserable dank
shed, trash-chocked, roofed in plastic, blackberries
ingrown amid jetsam. she dragged it all

into the light, sifting for tools or nails, then
consigning the rest to dump runs. With one son,
the quiet one, she re-roofed the room with scraps

from the house job, and installed used windows.
On the south, a sliding door turned on its side
served for greenhouse glass. A friend's offer

of a chimney to salvage solved the question
of how to floor. With her other son, the tall
one, she rented a forty-foot ladder and picked

bricks from the air, frightened half to death.
They piled them by the plant-room door, and the girl,
last child, brimful of jokes and laughter, brought

bricks one by one, which they set face up
in a herringbone pattern. They swept sand and
mortar into the cracks, and danced in the sun

which already had warmed the red clay. Now for
a bench, painted green for the color of wishing,
and pots of all sizes, flats too, with a tall can

for watering. She hankered for lettuce in
winter, and sowed the flats in October. After
a month, wild geese and their music gone south,

she noted her seedlings spindly and sad,
so picked up a hammer and some two-by-six,
and built a quick coldframe with the other half

of the always helpful sliding door. Outside
on the south wall in the duck pen she framed it,
and dibbled the seedlings within. They liked that,

but a darkness comes on in December; after
a full day, full week, one comes home exhausted
to eat, to sleep, not to water gardens.

One thing only has saved the lettuce: the ducks
do not like coming in for the night. She goes
out to the dark to disturb them; they rush home

complaining while the madwoman hops and chuckles.
She locks them away from coyotes, and turns,
as in afterthought, to visit her seedlings. By feel

she gives them their water, and tends them, her hands
stretching toward summer in the unseen leaves.
 
 
 

J. S. Bach

She turned up the weeds without pity, spreading
their roots before the sun. Most of them died,
though a few tenacious grasses rolled over

when she was not looking, and sucked earth
till she found them skulking about, and banished them
to the heap with the egg shells and old tea leaves.

Returning to the scene of the massacre, she placed
a five tined fork before her, pointed toward
the earth's core. On its step she placed her boot's

sole, and drove its teeth home, tearing living soil.
She did this many times, and in her hearing,
the dark loam whispered in protest. But what

was she to do? One must eat, and the white seeds
in their packet were waiting for the sun.
She carried a blue denim bag at her side,

and zippered it open, feeling about in its depths
like the housewife at the station platform
seeking her ticket for the last train--

Seizing her prize, she held it in a soiled palm,
reading the runes of the inscription:
"Date of last frost"; "zone three," "days

to maturity." How many days now to her own
maturity? Not to be thought of. Her hand
trembled. Tearing the thin paper rind,

she tipped out the contents: a shirtfront
of buttons. Five seeds to a hill she counted,
pinching their graves over them: three hills.

And on to other tasks. The rainmaker
whispered over the hilled earth all
the zone's days to maturity, and the date

of first frost held true. Almost forgotten in the rush
of gathering in the others: beans and corn, tomatoes--
she sought them last in October, the golden

fruits of that planting. Her other crops
talk to her; the Hubbards never do. (What are they
dreaming at, over there? She brings out the knife.)

Now it is March, and she remembers having gathered
the silent, sulking Hubbards. How are they faring?
A look into the pantry reveals them,

dour and uncommunicative, all
huddled like bollards on the high shelf.
She chooses one to halve on the kitchen block.

Scooping out seeds to dry and roast later,
hee bakes the halves till soft, slipping off skins
as per Rombauer and Becker. "Dice them,

and in a mixing bowl add butter, brown sugar,
salt, ginger, and move the lot to the mixer,
remembering to add milk." With a bowl

of silent Hubbard thus richly dressed,
she goes to the living room, asking a blessing
of the gods of the steel fork and the weeds,

the rainmaker, the packet of white seeds,
booted foot and blue denim bag
and the longtime summer sun, eating,

listening to a fugue by J. S. Bach.
 
 
 

Sometimes

this is what you'll come to, picking about
in earth, pulling morning glory roots
like long white worms and heaping them

beside you of a morning: you will become
distant and glum, and as your wrists dry up,
caked in clay, you'll look around you, and

not your small red barn, your irises,
your bamboo patch, your oak and ash,
your three brave maples rattling in the breeze,

your small house bracketed in lilacs, breathing smoke,
your woodshed stacked roof-high,
your mint and parsley putting on new life,

your geese, your ducks, your pear trees in bright bloom
will rid you of the thought of what this is
that you are digging, bit by troweled bit.

Assuming the sun will come out, which now
it does, things won't seem quite that bad,
and yet you will walk stooped, with furrowed

brow, into the house for a late cold lunch
without words, for there are no words
to share what it was the cold ground

said to your hands just now.
 
 
 
 

Or, sometimes

you'll come to this, lovingly rooting
in earth, gently setting to one side
fat worms, watching them

sink from sight with shrugs of their nonexistent
shoulders. As your wrists dry up, caked
in clay, you'll look around you, and

your small red barn, your irises,
your bamboo patch, your ash and oak,
your three unfurling maples whispering in the breeze,

your white house bracketed in lilacs, breathing
smoke, your woodshed stacked with fir,
your mint and parsley putting on new life,

your pears and apples, your geese in their bright plumes
will bring to you the thought of what this is
that you are digging, bit by troweled bit.

Assuming that the clouds will come, which now
they do, you will take things as they are,
and so you simply walk, with even-tempered

gaze, toward the house for a late cold lunch:
one without words, for there are no words
to share what it was your hands

said to the green earth even now.
 
 
 

It finds you

It finds you when it wants you, not before:
This time it found him among three dozen strangers
gathered to watch the earth eclipse the moon.

"There you are: let's go see the house we built
years ago, when first we settled on this land."
He followed her, watching the rhythm of her hips,

envying her husband, as she strode easy among
the white barked alders, setting aside
tall bracken with her hands. She showed

the house, its drunken roof. He drank in
every word, not to hear her sorrows, but to love
her voice. She bent among weeds, small hands

uprooting something small. "Here: you need
to take this home with you; water it good, okay?"
He stood desiring her, and not her apple mint,

holding the first of his gardens in his hand.
 
 
 

Snowed In

Several hours were required last night
for getting home from work, dodging cars
that drifted from their lanes to left and right.

She'll rise now early to wrap on frozen shoes
and try the country pavement for a sign
of whether weather must be paid its dues.

It must; icicles hang in soundless ranks
along the eaves, and snow has drifted in
her road, its ditches and its banks.

Retiring to the house, she builds two flames,
one in the stove to dry the boy and girl
on their return from raucous winter games,

the other on the hearth to use up wood
still sitting after the old saw died,
too lengthy to be offered as it should

to that efficient stove with whirring fan.
But she loves this fire best: she'll sit
with unshod feet on brick, and scan

Frost or Housman, as lantern glows.
Both fell from fashion, but their lines
betray some knowledge of the things she knows.
 
 
 

Frost at Midnight

She has been reading her Frost at midnight,
turning dogs-ear pages with her hand,
seeking the longer poems, less well known

than those short bits, so much
misunderstood by teachers as to be
thrown at school children year by year

as something not mixed with evil, and not speaking
foremost of pain, self-loathing,  fear. Some small
sound not in the fireplace brings her chin up

sharp. Rising from the comfort-making chair,
she makes rounds, checks each darkened room.
None stirring; only a landscape of dreams

above each head, filled with kinds of longing,
rehashings of the day's dismays. Turning
from interior ghosts to exterior,

she steps to the largest window, lifts
the paisley bedsheet meant for curtain
there. Moonlight, and another kind of frost

such as another poet loved. Finding clogs,
she tiptoes into shadows beneath the moon.
Beyond, rubbing against lilacs and a half dead

apple tree, his neighbor's cows. She goes to them,
offering, blandly, frost-white grass,
and turns to see his hunkered house

quite abashed beneath its tent of faded stars.
Will these children live? She now wishes
fervently to know. Should their difficult dreams

find form, in metal, pool, or life-consuming flame
and seek them out, she might well be powerless
against the then rushing in of dark.

A red cow nips her idled hand; she starts,
ripping palm across barbed wire. The blood
seems in moonlight black, or green perhaps.

Blood gone from woman, she from house, this moment
a vector: metamorphoses, Ovid, the placid cows.
She returns, stepping in the black holes her feet

had made. The comfort-making chair, with its
very good but not quite comforting Frost,
sits waiting for her life to go on, as if

that were a thing not changed.
 
 
 

Hall Creek Canyon

When they returned from building the kay-dam
(of logs and drift pins, to make again
a place where salmon might yet spawn)

they divvied up: each hauled a pack frame
loaded with tools and sundries, twice down
the canyon to its end, then up the old fire trails

a mile and a half, ducking vine maples
all the way, to the parked trucks. A third trip
for each would end the business,

but night came on, as it generally does;
they might have come back another day, but
as the moon was full, down they went.

One folded and refolded the old tent
and packed it away, while the others sat,
taking down the old sheepherder stove,

dumping ashes, talking. He would walk ahead,
he said, and slumped off down the scoured
sandstone ledge of the dry wash, admiring,

even in near exhaustion, the old moon
drifting among the snags. He came upon
the canyon with its pools and riffles,

and, regarding the first fire trail
as too steep, trudged on to the second,
wading a beaver pond. Logs at the head,

old growth, lay jackstraw piled, and he footed
along them easily, as he had done
in dozens of such draws. A big cedar sighed,

turned lovingly in its sleep, and with
an almost inaudible click, closed over his shoe.
There was with him no axe, no lever of any kind.

He stood knee deep in black water, too far
from the landing to be heard, neatly caught.
What if his co-workers took that other trail?

He looked back as he let slip his heavy pack,
seeing no movement but the falling moon,
knowing that a man alone in such a place

has, while he is there, no name at all.
 
 
 
 

Silence

At this high bridge begins silence, even
as whitecapped water beneath
runs against rock and fill the hearing

with its white roar; this is not the sound
of human trivialities, of men
running down women, or women turning aside

with embarrassed smiles from men,
or the sound of the pulling of tabs,
ripping of aluminum, or the assorted

purrs and rumbles of fire along the pike,
wrapped in steel. She gathers her old friends,
space blanket, matchsafe, whistle, map,

cheese, bread, water bottle, and poncho,
and stuffs them in her tattered fireman's vest.
This is a new place, but deduction finds

the lightly traveled path, snaking across
a landscape of indissoluble stillness.
The vine maples have yet no leaves,

and the moss-lined nests in their jointures
contain no eggs. There are times
when the tall firs on these ridges

creak and suffer like a forest of masts
in a wind-swept harbor: this is no such time.
She has been used to walking alone in the forests;

has walked among peaks dawn-rosy
at sunrise, or hunkering under the wuther
of rain-heavy winds, or under a smother of clouds

among tree-trunks. Now, of a sudden,
she stops, and puzzles at her alienness.
What can be different? There are yellow violets,

trilliums, oxalis. She gathers moss and horse lettuce,
a couple of conks, and pebbles, yet the connection
is missing. Her heart leaps cold in her chest,

and her pulse rattles. On an impulse she whirls
round on her track, examines
the trail behind her and a hillside of

silences. The silence is plural, but how
do you read absence? What does she not see?
Bear? Cougar? It is a feeling one has

when the sights of the rifle are trained
on the back of one's neck. Often in life
she has felt this, but only in cities

and the lifelines of cities, those rivers
of asphalt and their pageant of strangers.
She must establish hherself here, she feels;

some introduction has been omitted. She searches
her vest and locates an old pipe,
a treasure remaining from another life;

it goes where she goes, though she thinks of it seldom.
There is little tobacco in the bowl, but enough,
and she chooses a bit of mountain,

a leaf of kinnikinnick, to add. Self-consciously
borrowing culture, she aims the pipe
at the four points of the compass, the grey sky,

the soundless earth at her feet, and sits,
fumbling with the lid of her matchsafe.
Fire lit, she sends smoke quietly aloft.

It rises uncertainly, then finds the drift
of cold air sliding downslope into evening.
Whatever seemed angry seems to her angry still,

but gives way before the smoke of offering,
and makes with her a capful of truce: she will not
be eaten today, it seems, tripped up, or smashed.

She will not name the place, "place where I broke
my leg" or "place where I lost my spirit."
In return, she must finish this hike now

and not soon return. Replacing the horse lettuce,
conks, moss, and stones, she wryly smiles
a little: if this is superstition, so let it be,

she says to herself. We do what we have to do.
The silence, which she'd thought a hieroglyph
of an unknown tongue, nods and agrees.
 
 
 
 

The Wall Her Father Built

The wall her father built to muscle back
the brown flood waters of the creek still stands.
It leans away from the run and hugs the contour

of serpentine embankment, redeeming years of silt
by interlacing a thousand granite slabs
against the tide of spring and spill of storm.

He could not bear the thought of land
he'd paid for, picking up to run away downstream
ending in useless mingling with other men's dirt

deep at the foot of the continental shelf
ten miles beyond the Chattahoochee's mouth.
So, he built. Each day, though tired from climbing

poles in Georgia sun for the Georgia Rail Road,
he slowly removed his cotton shirt and sank
to his knees in the creek, feeling for stones

with his bare toes, and prying them out of bed
with a five-foot iron bar. He heaved them up,
wet and substantial, on the opposite bank,

and judged them, then carried them, staggering
under the load, to their exact spot in the rising wall,
setting them down like Hammurabi's laws, never

to be revoked. The whole he stocked and faced
with wet cement his daughter carried to him,
breathless, in a pair of buckets

swung from a home-carved yoke. The wall done,
he capped it with a pointing trowel, and with
his finger wrote his child's name and the year

nineteen fifty-five, which you will find today
if you scrape back moss. The house has had
six owners since, and of these not one has given thought

to who prevented their foundation washing out
with freely offered labor long ago: or perhaps
they have. There's something in a wall's

being there that speaks of someone's having lived
and looked upon the land, giving thought to time
and change, taking stone in hand.
 
 
 
 
 

Beech Lake

Spring, and spring of her life also,
and life returns to the long green lake,
new water striders, and rustlings below of bream

bug hunting beneath reflected beeches
and slow movements of old men fishing
in shade of same. See walks down to water

to stand sun-hot behind sedges, shoes wet, thinking
of snakes. And then snakes come; first one, lazily,
tail stroking, head high, counterclockwise

along the shore, and then another. And then
another. All going, she notes, the same way round.
Next day, incorrigible child, she rigs a black fly rod

with stout green line tied at butt end and tip end:
a snare. Back to the sun-long lake, the deep dreaming
bream, and the fishing men. The snakes

continue their rounds. She casts loop, and waits.
One comes, riding high in clear water, black eye
bright. Caught, the looping, livid thing

bends the rod double almost. On close inspection
she speaks its given name: common water snake.
Proudly she touches the twisting ribbon of flesh,

but it turns to sink four rows of teeth
deep in the base of her thumb. Shamefaced, she
lets the bright creature go; it swims sedately,

maddeningly counter-clockwise: nothing
has happened to change its agenda. Rod forgotten,
she sinks to her knees among sedges to watch

the fishing men quietly fishing in beech-shade,
shading her eyes with her still throbbing hand.
 
 
 
 
 

William Stafford

Here was a man who was known
    as an Oregon poet.
He never wasted words, either.
    He wrote a poem

Every day, rain or shine, and so
    he had some
rain poems and some shine poems
    and if people

came to him saying, sir, give us a book
    he would turn
and rummage in desk drawers
    or grope

along shelves in the kitchen.
    Pretty soon
there was their book, bright as
    Sunday morning

but sharp, too, like bottle glass.
    He'd hand
it to them carefully, carefully.
    And it was

their hint. After that they'd have to
    look out for themselves,
and that, I guess, was his Oregon
    message.
 
 
 
 

Newfoundland

Whiteness enough off that coast to last a summer,
with chunks sized to drift among the swells
like lost boats rising bottoms up to glimmer,

then dropping from a coastal watcher's view
halfway from here to wherever it is the sky
comes down to touch the water, blue on blue,

or even larger continents of white
shot through with green, shouldering breakers
with unhurried calm, things for night

to break on, or even day. You and I,
not having seen such before, go out
to frame each other with one in a camera's eye

and watch a schooner nosing among the bays
scalloped along the fringes of the beast.
The little ship goes near, but turns away

over and over to run, a cur who knows how strong
the behemoth it harries, how final its mere touch.
The white rock nothing notes, but wades along,

a mindless thing, and yet it knows command: we
think of the Titanic, sleeping in its mud,
having discharged a cargo on the sea.
 
 
 

Separation

Round the circle of her garden she walks, and stops
again, taking in, as one absent from her own
senses yet unwilling to forego their gifts,

the half-dimmed light of a low, prepubescent
moon, its influence on the lingering clouds,
some few stars brave enough to compete with

mercury vapor or halogen or tungsten,
and taking in also the pungent garlic circle,
its enclosure of bean vines, celery, snap peas:

celebratory things, even in this half-light,
this dew of forgotten hours. Her feet,
though well shod, warn her of night, by noting

a slow seep of dew round toes and heels,
while her hand, brushing past night-blooming
jasmine, shrinks from chill. These, and trees

she has encouraged -- apple, plum, pear, cherry,
maple, ash -- seem to her reproachful,
watching, as it were, her heart begin to slip

to a life they cannot share. Beyond, in a stillness
of curtained rooms, her children,
innocent of this need, dream of loss.
 
 
 

Grace

They do not always sit with an easy grace,
the aging: in afternoon light, even in October,
the cracks that invade her clear skin

show in relief, and he knows in dismay,
seeing her, his own once simple face
crowding itself, as when a life within

doors runs out of thought. Yet, sober
as this renders him, he will not turn away
from her to seek some easier play:

there is no win or lose, no hunt, no race,
no battle. His eyes would disrobe her,
for she is to him more than she has been,

and he would know all, even here,
as passers pass, not seeing what his eyes see;
but he will wait on her clear sign

that this is welcome, even from his gaze,
for she has known that men hold themselves dear,
and known too long their avarice that she

should shape to their dreams, their ways,
their endless drawing round her of sharp lines,
their wrapping an arm carelessly round her days,

their failing, in so many years, to touch the key
moment of her heart, that movement lacking fear
when she might freely give without design.

Placing her hand in his, she shifts and sighs;
a not unhappy sound, considering the hour
and how late, as well, this man has come to her:

five decades they have lived apart,
as though all meaning had had to be deferred;
as though autumn alone might show love's power;

as though some gods, having hated happy hearts,
had suddenly relented, offering them this prize.
 
 
 

Carefully

As the rains return again, she notes, almost
in passing, how her love for them remains, and
how the darkness, and wind, and sorry days of

work and worry cannot shake it. We are not
built to last, and we know that; some speak of life
as if it were stark tragedy alone, a

trudging from diaper to death bed, doomed
because end it must. Others try, by seeking
comedic relief, to put such gloom aside,

assuming that to live brightly today will,
somehow, pay for the pain of barely living
later, when the last years have but begun.

The truth place somewhere between. She would,
if the gods permitted, lose herself in their eyes
every day of forever, but knowing this

will end, and relatively soon, makes her not
over-sad, nor will she lie to herself, or
them, with thoughtless laughter; rather it makes her

carefully love, deeply, as she does now,
breathing a name in, breathing it out, like prayer.
 
 
 

Cityscape with pink rose

I've stopped at the flower lady's cart
to see if she has roses. There are a few,
with straggling leaves, but the blooms

are decent still, especially those in pink.
She interrupts her desultory lunch,
brushing crumbs from her sleeve, to slip

a long-stemmed pink from among the buds,
carries it to her work table, and deftly wraps
the stalk in a yellow paper, tying it,

gentle-fingered, with a thin red ribbon.
I am watching her face; it is not unlike that
of the woman I love, but it seems closed.

She has dwelt upon disappointments.
Turning away, I see in my mind's
eye, myself turning back to buy for her

one of her own roses. Idiot! I tell myself,
no doubt she must throw away many; wouldn't
she be sick, by now, of bloom?

Trading, as she does, in these signs
of the happiness of others, what would be
happiness to her, here, today? I'm catching

her eye, wary now, as if to say:
is there some problem with the rose? No.
Or, rather, yes. Or no. I stand shifting weight

self-consciously from foot to foot,
trapped in the mystery of unshareable joys.
 
 
 

Graduation: a History
 (from the OED)*

First, consider that to live is to grow.
So manie graduations your wisedome
must attaine. Second, the definition for today,

“holding a University degree:”
Chosin be the hayl graduattis
of the vniuersitie. You, then, are

chosen. But you have been makers of your
own destiny in this choice: His ambition
is, that he either is or shall be

a graduate. A smell, there, of sweat and lamp.
There are implications. Have we mastered
our craft? As if the very tearms of

Architraues, and Frizes, and Cornices
were enough to graduate a Master
of this Art... You may meet, then, cynicism.

Overcome such through action: To graduate
the first side of your staff, you must lay the
Ruler to the Centre. Arrived in a

working world, you will touch the eyes of
patrons by design: To make lights graduate
as they ought. And it helps to remember:

you have friends. Our affections graduate
according to a truer scale than that
of hereditary rank. Look about

you. Commit to your heart: these. They already
know your unfolding story, and know that you
will graduate the heaven-vaulting stars.
 

________________________________
* Commencement poem. University of Oregon program in Arts & Administration, School of Architecture and Allied Arts, June 1999. Cited from the Oxford English Dictionary in the order of their appearance: Norton (1477), Buchanan (1563), Overbury (1615), Wotton (1624), Blundevil (1624), Gilpin (1786), Martineau (1832).
 
 
 
 

Everyman

Upon slowly waking, Everyman
rouses from a dream of fear. Was it his life
threatened by someone waving a rusted single-

shot twenty-two, or had he sought to destroy
someone, a trusted neighbor or loved parent?
His spine has filled with fluids overnight, yes,

again, and his ankles give him pain. Across
the silent shoulders of his wife he must crawl,
or stumble round the bed to find the handle

of his life, or only the door, never slipping.
The floor creaks with dry rot as he steps among
the objects that define him: belt found in snow

on a job in Idaho (but no corpse nearby);
hat bought by mail from Amish farmers, brim bent
to Western specifications; shoes sent from

Wisconsin by mail also; and a shirt from
Maine. He feels, Braille-fingered, for the small room where
all who seek may find that men and women are

only men and women; here they see themselves
before any others see, and by a harsh light:
his eye looks deeply through him from the glass, and

tells him his sorrows are contemptible. So,
but he stands still, washing his sad eyes, and combs
the stiff grey bristles of his jaw, and lifts

the glass of well water with its sulfur whiff
and drinks. He does not plan to die today, no,
nor call in sick, returning to the now-cold

sheets, seeking to resolve that dream. Call it
what you will, habit if you like, but he walks
into the living room, satisfactory

sight, rebuilt by him despite poverty: White
walls and ceiling clean and textured, fireplace patched,
mantel graced with old oil lamps, seemly books:

here he slowly dresses. Outside, darkness, low
clouds, and the spitting mouths, incessant, of down-
spouts. He shrugs. Through kitchen to the cold mudroom

listening to the change in foot-fall of his
heels, from wood to tile, to concrete, he steps on,
pace quickening, no entropy now stops him:

gathering a bent umbrella and stained coat,
he opens a door and goes out to the world.
 
 
 

Handcraft

Forty-one hands will be set to the document.
A high-school senior draws it up,
building its parts in the traditional way.

She puts a house among trees, in its small clearing,
and sets a great mountain wrapped in summer snow
on the far horizon. Two birds circle overhead,

ravens, perhaps, or they might be buzzards.
Smoke rises, a little, from the chimney,
breakfast smoke, not enough fire yet for tea,

a work in progress. She makes a border of roses,
not forgetting to include thorns. The words
of the traditional vows she pens in line by line,

remembering to leave out the word obey.
This is to be a modern Quaker marriage, after all.
Below, she leaves a space untouched, for witnesses.

It is not known, beforehand, who will sign.
Those who come to this wedding will be those
who come every week for Meeting. It is the first

day of the week, it is morning, it is the ordinary time
for sitting and thinking and listening for God;
such ordinariness is all the sacrament they have.

Afterwards they'll rise, shake hands round,
then step to a table to set their names in ink:
the groom, the bride, thirty-nine witnesses,

old and young. Some of the ink that is used
will begin to disappear, but memory serves
to take its place. The vows are set to last one span

of years. So long as both their minds endure,
these two will remember who they are.
 
 
 
 

An Oregon Canto

"What this geezer endured for us
I can't imagine; in sunny Italy all that time,
wading River Styx in his brain: could you

write a poem for fifty years?" Well, no,
not I, but I'm only a clerking man,
knock out statistics on earnest youth

year in, year out, another kind of work. So,
occasionally, between Friday and Monday,
because they've let us out of cage, we drones

scatter across landscape, picking up stones
and spotting them across smooth water, or
stumping up steep paths beneath dark firs,

hoping to glimpse something or other
from some abandoned fireman's hut. We talk
of Ezra Pound, or of metaphysical stuff: does

God have a backside? or: see the black bark
on the older trees here on the south side?
That fire ran up here and died out, showing

that heat rises, and that north slopes
stay damp the year round. Odysseus
never slept here; or if he did, then Circe

would never have made pigs. Black bears
she would make, and not stop with his men:
behold her masterwork, the Odysseus bear,

wily, mean, a logroller, tearing up salmonberry
patches, berserking amid devil's club, spraying
huckleberry pies on trails and meadows. So if

Telemakos worried his men down to the ship,
and bent their strong backs to his purpose
over the wine-dark seas and foam, reading

skies and deep, only to hear, this time,
from Menelaus and that woman, nothing of import--
would he not, hero and son of a hero,

beat all the Middle Sea for his island's man,
wearing out wood and flesh beneath him?
At length he would set axe to the world's tree,

and build of it a thing wonderful, deep-
keeled, tight-clinkered, with a thousand stories
writhing in its sail: and not rest till he had found

out all the lands, their sorceresses, their pig-men,
their island kings, their dark-eyed daughters
of island kings. Last would he come to

Ooligan, that fish-glue land, to speak
to the Siuslaws in their tongue, saying:
I seek a mighty man, a man of vision,

a man who speaks in silver and gold,
whose hand raised grapes and a people
from a stony soil, who built a wooden beast

with which to throw down towers of stone
and a sad old king. The Siuslaws might
regard him then as one like themselves,

devotees of Raven, that madcap,
always one step ahead, making the world
for a joke. One would lead him to Grass

Mountain, then, show him the huckleberry
pies. Good luck, son: he's been here ten
years, scratching his back on the trees--

if that guy wants to go home to his wife
you're welcome to him, but we always thought
he was more our kind. Why don't you just

come on down to the village with us,
bake some clams? And then Telemakos
would have to think mighty hard to recall his purpose

amid so many shades of green.