Riprap
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
(second shaman song)
Squat in swamp shadows.
mosquitoes sting;
high light in cedar above.
Crouched in a dry vain frame
- thirst for cold snow
- green slime of bone marrow
Seawater fills each eye
Quivering in nerve and muscle
Hung in the pelvic cradle
Bones propped against roots
A blind flicker of nerve
Still hand moves out alone
Flowering and leafing
turning to quartz
Streaked rock congestion of karma
The long body of the swamp.
A mud-streaked thigh.
Dying carp biting air
in the damp grass,
River recedes. No matter.
Limp fish sleep in the weeds
The sun dries me as I dance
Old Woman Nature
Old Woman Nature
naturally has a bag of bones
tucked away somewhere.
a whole room full of bones!
A scattering of hair and cartilage
bits in the woods.
A fox scat with hair and a tooth in it.
a shellmound
a bone flake in the streambank.
A purring cat, crunching
the mouse head first,
eating on down towards the tail -
The sweet old woman
calmly gathering firewood in the
moon . . .
Don't be shocked,
She's heating you some soup.
Ripples on the Surface
“Ripples on the surface of water
were silver salmon passing under—different
from the sorts of ripples caused by breezes”
A scudding plume on the wave—
a humpback whale is
breaking out in air up
gulping herring
—Nature not a book, but a performance, a
high old culture.
Ever-fresh events
scraped out, rubbed out, and used, used, again—
the braided channels of the rivers
hidden under fields of grass—
The vast wild
the house, alone.
the little house in the wild,
the wild in the house.
both forgotten.
No nature.
Both together, one big empty house.
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