Hanging Out by Putah
Creek with Younger Poets
Sitting on the dusty
dry-leaf crackly ground,
freeway rumble south,
black walnut shade,
crosslegged, hot,
exchanging little poems
Yet Older Matters
A rain of black rocks out of space
onto deep blue ice in Antarctica
nine thousand feet high scattered for miles.
Crunched inside yet older matter
from times before our very sun
(from a conversation with Eldridge Moores & Kim Stanley Robinson)
I thought, forest fires burning to the north!
yellow nomex jacket thrown in the cab, hard-hat, boots,
I gunned the truck up the dirt-road scrambling,
and came out on a flat stretch with a view:
shimmering blue-green streamers and a red glow down the sky —
Stop. Storms on the sun. Solar winds going by
(The night of the red aurora borealis: seen as far south as northern California, April 2001)
A Dent in a Bucket
Hammering a dent out of a bucket
a woodpecker
answers from the woods
Baby jackrabbit on the ground
thick furry brindled coat
little black tailtip
back of the neck ate out,
life for an owl.
Work Day
They want —
Short lengths of 1” schedule 40 PVC
A 10’ chimney sweeping brush
someone to grind the mower blades
a log chain,
my neighbors’ Spring work.
Chainsaw dust
clay-clod stuck spade
apple blossoms and bees
The slender tender Asian pear
unpruned, skinny, by the zendo
never watered, ragged,
still puts out fruit
fence broken,
trunk scored with curls of bark,
bent-off branches, high-up scratches —
pears for a bear
Cool Clay
In a swarm of yellowjackets
a squirrel drinks water
feet in the cool clay, head way down
Walking back from the Dharma-Talk
summer dry madrone
leaves rattle down
“Give up! give up!
Oh sure!” they say
How
small birds flit
from bough
to bough to bough
to bough to bough to bough
Green pinecone flakes
pulled, gnawed clean around,
wobbling, slowly falling
scattering on the ground,
whack the roof.
Tree-top squirrel feasts
— twitchy pine boughs.
Yowl
Out of the underbrush
a bobcat bursts chasing a housecat.
Crash — yowl — silence.
Pine pollen settles again.
Green steel waste bins
flapping black plastic lids
gobbling flattened cardboard,
far off, a backup beeper
Standup Comics
A parking meter that won’t take coins
a giant sprinkler valve wheel chained and locked
a red and white fire hydrant
a young dandelion at the edge of the pavement
Cottonwoods streambank
splashing fording up the creekbed
black phoebe calling pi pi pi here, near —
Mexican blackhawk cruising — squint at the sky,
shoes full of sand
(Aravaipa Canyon, Arizona)
Mimulus on the Road to Town
Out of cracks in the roadcut rockwalls,
clumps of peach-colored mimulus
spread and bloom,
stiffly quiver in the hot
log-truck breeze-blast
always going by —
they never die.
Falconers used to believe that the third hawk egg in a clutch would be a male. So they call a young male hawk a “tercel” from tertius, “third.” Who knows why carmakers name their cars the way they do.
Taking the gas cap off
stick it in my work vest pocket
I see a silver Tercel parked
by a hedge and a waste bin full of bottles
— filling my old Toyota pickup.
Brighter Yellow
An “Ozark Trucking” bigrig pulls up
by me on the freeway, such a vivid yellow!
a brighter yellow than bulldozers.
This morning James Lee Jobe was talking
of the wild blue bonnets
and the dark red Indian paintbrush down in Texas.
Said, “from a distance — them growing all together
makes a field of solid purple.”
Hey — keep on the right side
of that yellow line
Spawning salmon dark and jerky
just below the surface ripple
shallow lower Yuba
River bed — old mining gravels
mimicking a glacier outflow
perfect for the redds below Parks Bar.
(how hydraulic mining made the Yuba Goldfields like a post-glacial river in Alaska)