CHAPTER 1

    FLYING ON I-5 SOUTH


    Band of early mist, a long scarf,
    clear, unclear, drawn across the field.

    Horizontal sunlight raying its way
    into low oaks and grasses.

    The cows chew, disconnected, unacquainted—
    facing their black directions.

    Bent down at necks thick as trunks,
    eyes shut, pleasant with eating. Noses

    swaying—happy—down in the starry grass.


    LATE FALL BIRDS

    High winds
    & the birds
    scattered like
    flipping leaves
    down granite sky.
    No telegram they can call out for me.
    No seed I can toss up toward them.
    In the dawn glow
    I paint my pictures again
    on the ocean just past the stars
    & shuffle in slow steps.
    Keeping a pace along the path
    winding behind the houses. Down—
    as if to thoughts describing
    the way poplars
    stand against the windy light.
    Even the sky is tumbling away.


    SLEEPING TOGETHER

    "I may not hope from outward forms to win
    The passion and the life, whose fountains are within."
    —Coleridge.

    After loving we sleep, then wake together
    in the night's forest wilds where thoughts
    soften and swim down as if to reach
    the central seeds of unkempt apple trees.

    We're not exactly awake, maybe even
    not exactly in love, just swept—like dust,
    like thistle butterflies, like all things riding air—
    into the looming mansion of dreams.

    Here we vision generous waves collapsing over,
    where sea tide and wreathing rods of riverwater
    collide, and show the way inland to those
    who can read pure light. We're

    Mendocino coast, where a riverway
    tumbles outward, lost in massy ocean swirls.
    We let our lives go in such water-rushes,

    in summer thunder, that code
    signaling the coming of logical light,
    of barren day with its hard gleam.


    DREAMS, HIGH GRASS

    he turns over in bed
    sings the first word
    for wolves they wander & sniff
    along ditch & fence
    tails
    high in yellow light grassy wind
    he dreams the hard dream strolls
    along the field in dim shirt & pants
    his rifle butt smooth
    dark as any flesh he would stroke
    wolves
    lope along easy in the field
    land & wolves move sure
    as a turning over in sleep
    now he
    shoots enters the howl
    that alerts three counties he
    turns again steps into evening here's
    lamplight wide as the continent
    dead wolves
    snap in his face force him to fly down
    in the gyroscope of matter and time
    kneel on sands
    wash a wound
    in a body in a diamond
    sending gemstone fire
    into his eyes


    MEDITATION, PERFECT AIR—RED DEER RIVER

    May the trees take what's left of your thought and pain.
    May the details of vine and threading tendril be enough
    as they
    sneak their slow grip around slender trunks and whatever
    sifts
    through head, heart and old feet cramped with years.

    May you and I aspire to listen like the faces hiding out
    in these branches, excited by small things, by a wind's
    motion
    rippling the flat light on water, by the small droplets
    that sink into earth so the packed dirt of the woods can
    feed
    full-grown cedar and oak. They say everything

    comes from wind. Bless me, for I turn, glad and
    angled, crazy in this thin frame—I too stir the air like
    Persian mystics who smiled in the wisdom of summer
    dust.
    I too surrender, throwing my old names down into rock
    debris.

    I shrug and traipse off to reverse everything: I roll
    in riverine grassland, celebrating what's new.
    Let's toss ourselves together to the unspeaking ring
    of horizon, outdo the naked Persians' mythic tales
    and chant songs. Friend, I ache to be nothing

    but outskirts, deep soil, and sky that greets people
    everywhere
    and lives inside. It must be that by now no thing making
    color
    or shape or music can call us away from the plan made up
    by variable winds. They cross through this day of
    perpetual arrival
    where we climb into sequoia's immortal powers

    laying out the whole of our journey along the poor, dry
    soils,
    this pine forest. We agree to accidents under hard
    November sky
    where flowers kneel and bow their heads. The air
    gathers tension. Still, we return to take our green hold
    in the sweet promise of rain.


    FLIGHTS

    A sea roars in me.
    Two pointed birds
    sail the air.
    I pick up their scraping calls,
    flights to a shore,
    a white arc within sight.
    Above the huts, and filling
    with blue and white skies,
    a temple.


    REPORTS FROM LI BAI

    Night becomes a glowing when I sleep.
    I fly in a bird's wings,
    view my country's tilting fields—
    riches of wisdom, water and mud.

    My countrymen believed the soul
    would spin away from the body
    in the wind rhythms of sleep, and the mind,
    gone for a stroll, would rest

    in high hallways of tossing trees. The soul
    would see those leaves top and bottom, move
    like half-seen moons shimmering
    in their hues of tawny pearl. Then soul

    comes back to bed, views the covers as
    mountains that drift along grand avenues of night.
    In that dark, good friends, be certain
    that my deeper companions—

    many other shapes in wings—
    glide low and watch for us all.


    SAYING A TUNE
    BY THE CHOWCHILLA RIVER

    salmon
    slaps a kiss

    on silver water
    from underneath

    ring shapes
    swell out

    hawk and condor
    wear long wings

    long cries
    turn the sky

    the bright blue wheels


    CAT—DESCRIPTIVE MUSIC

    Sir Cat, my cat, anthology of
    moving curves in noon light.
    master of scratchy yowls, musical
    grunts, indirections, studied arrogance.
    master of warming air and its
    early-morning clean beyond your eyes,
    beyond my windows. Beyond this
    weather full of scents, temperatures and
    glassy luster, a jade green—so nicely fitted and

    flirtatious all around you. Your whiter fur with
    floating islands of black. Your composure? Royal,
    indignant, explaining all the shades of mood
    clear back to thought-lines of Pythagoras
    on his green Greek Isle. My imperious cat, you
    lift an arm, hold the pose, lick, and a cosmos
    clicks into place; heaven, in multiple bandwidths,
    swings into this moment where you and I

    would hum charmed unisons with
    the brief specks of stars—even as
    morning sunlight simmers them out of view.
    Cat under my window, living by pauses,
    you sigh once in your compact, surrounding pool
    of meditations, meaning high grasses;
    mice rustling down in leaves.
    Cat, Sir Cat of mine, you possess
    such slow and hypnotic zeal for their tiny bodies.

    If I were the master dreamer, I'd watch events
    only through your princely patience, my sight
    fluid as your bones, muscle and fur,
    enchanted as the nighttime wells
    of your eyes—lunar surfaces, secrets inviolable,

    reassembled in relief after night's long alarm,
    roof-clattering summer rain—for you, it's
    a full-out terror of straight lines
    hissing down against the house, and you

    skitter along in hunkered-down crouch.
    And sit, ball of tensile fuzz in the hamper, proving—
    as the gray of rain demands—that you're
    also master of the ongoing, compact tunes
    inside stone.


    A MORNING HOME ALONE

    my wife's cat
    shadows past me.
    I stand in the linty,
    fluorescent laundry room,
    half lost, half
    found inside
    my notebook of loamy,
    procreating fields where
    I make up skies
    and a blue lake sliced
    by translucent wind.
    and the marveling shadow
    skitters, beckoning me till
    I entertain a wish
    for a magic life. He lopes
    down the long beige
    rectangle of this back hall.
    his shoulderblades
    gyrate with friendly spells,
    composure worth the price
    of any dried-up mona lisa.
    if I would only
    follow him, we'd
    hum all around
    the ceilings of this
    house alone—
    many small suns.
    many golden eyes.


    MOOD

    maple—
    late fall—amber—
    silver-gold light drifts and
    glimmers in leaves—dry bones of life
    sharper


    FOLLOW WHISTLING

    Under wide sky I'm
    thin and singing, wandering around on sunlight.
    Seedlings' leaves, warm in surrounding miles,

    prompt me through deeps of forest, where love
    does the right thing and I'm whispered
    to find the stream for you. To wait up past
    midnight.

    It may be that you'll follow my whistling
    through black spruce and alder. And know the spot
    for drinking daybreak, spring-water, the white
    flowers and

    edible red berries everywhere. Take heart: Plants
    gleam within many lives; brave seeds fly on leafy
    wings,
    scouting out one sun after another,

    eradicating a century of sad news
    as the brightest eye beams phantom secrets
    and daytime stars glide into you.


    (Red Star Ridge, Nevada)