We are both in dreams, appearing in dream forms. I add words spoken in sleep: Turn this way; I’m lonely too this autumn evening.
MATSUO BASHŌ
When did all this happen, this rain and snow bending green branches, this turning of light to shadow in my throat, these bird notes going flat, and how did these sawtooth willow leaves unscrew themselves from the twig, and the hard, bright paths trampled into the hills loosen themselves to mud? When did the wind begin churning inside trees, and why did the sixty-million-year-old mountains start looking like two uplifted hands holding and releasing the gargled, whistling, echoing grunts of bull elk, and when did the loose fires inside me begin not to burn?
Wasn’t it only last week, in August, that I saw the stained glass of a monarch butterfly clasping a purple thistle flower, then rising as if a whole cathedral had taken flight? And didn’t Dante and Beatrice, whose journey I have been tracing, finally rise from fire to Paradise?
Now what looks like smoke is only mare’s tails—clouds streaming—and as the season changes, my young dog and I wonder if raindrops might not be shattered lightning.
It’s September. Light is on the wane. There is no fresh green breast of earth to embrace. None of that. Just to breathe is a kind of violence against death. To long for love, to have experienced passion’s deep pleasure, even once, is to understand the mercilessness of having a human body whose memory rides desire’s back unanchored from season to season.
Last night while driving to town I hit a deer. She jumped into my path from behind bushes so close I could not stop. A piece of red flesh flew up and hit the windshield. I watched as she ran off limping. There was nothing I could do. Much later, on the way home, I looked for her again. I could see where a deer had bedded down beside a tree, but there was no sign of a wounded animal, so I continued on.
Halfway up our mountain road a falling star burned a red line across the sky—a meteorite, a pristine piece of galactic debris that came into existence billions of years before our solar system was made. The tail stretched out gold and slid. I stopped the truck. I was at the exact place where, years ago, I declared love to a friend, who grabbed his heart as if in pain, then said laconically, “What do you mean?”
Tonight on the same road in a different year I see only the zigzagging of foxes, whose red tails are long floats that give their small bodies buoyancy. No friends meet me to view the stars. The nights have turned cold. The crickets’ summer mating songs have hardened into drumbeats, and dark rays of light pole out from under clouds as if steadying the flapping tent of the sky.
Even when the air is still I keep hearing a breeze, the way it shinnies up the bones of things, up the bark of trees. A hard frost pales the hayfields. Tucked into the flickering universe of a cottonwood tree, yellow leaves shaped like gloved hands reach across the green umbrella for autumn.
It’s said that after fruition nothing will suffice, there is no more, but who can know the answer? I’ve decided to begin at the end when the earth is black and barren. I want to see how death is mixed in, how the final plurals are taken back to single things—if they are; how and where life stirs out of ash.
On May 5, the first day the roads opened, my husband and I drove to Yellowstone Park. Twenty miles before the east entrance, we were greeted by buffalo: four mother cows, one yearling, and a newly born calf. At Sylvan Pass a young couple were skiing down a precipitous snow-covered landslide, then trudging up the nearly vertical slope carrying their skis. Just before we reached Yellowstone Lake, a pair of blue grouse, in the midst of a courting display, could not be moved from the center of the road. Neck and tail feathers plumed and fanned out; we waited. The lake was all ice. Far out, a logjam—upended, splintered, frozen in place—was the eye’s only resting place in all that white.
At the next bend we came on a primordial scene: north of Mary’s Bay, wide, ice-covered meadows were full of dead buffalo, and searching for grass in among the carcasses were the barely live bison who had survived a rigorous winter, so thin they looked like cardboard cutouts, a deep hollow between their withers and ribs.
We drove on. More dead bison, and dead elk. The Park biologists were saying that roughly twenty-eight percent of both herds had been winter-killed this year, not only because the fires diminished their forage but also because the drought had brought us five years of mild winters, thus allowing old and sick animals to survive.
Between Madison Junction and the Firehole River we stood in the charred ruins of a lodgepole pine forest. The hollow trunks of burned-out trees looked as if they had been picked up and dropped, coming to rest at every possible angle. The ground was black. Where the fire had burned underground, smoldering root systems upended trees; ponds and bogs that had supported waterfowl were now waterless depressions. Way back in the trees, a geyser hissed, its plume of white steam a ghost of the great fire’s hundred-mile-long streamer of smoke.
Later we returned to the lake and sat on the end of a long spit of land that angles out into water. From there it’s difficult to tell there was a fire. Lodgepole pines fringe the shore. A cloud that had moved off Mount Sheridan rolled toward us, its front edge buffeted by wind. In ancient Greece it was said that Boreas, god of the north wind, became jealous of his lover, Pitys, who had been flirting with Pan, and threw her against a rocky ledge. At that moment she turned into a pine tree. The amber drops of sap at the breaks of limbs are her tears.
Pines are ancient trees, having appeared 170 million years ago. The Buriat people in eastern Siberia consider groves of trees sacred and always ride through them in silence, while in Japan, pines stand for loyalty and longevity. As I sat, the cloud took me midthought, slamming into the fringe of pines, shattering, becoming white needles.
That was May, and now it’s September, and already frost is breaking down the green in leaves, then clotting like blood as tannin, anthocyanin, carotene, and xanthophyll. If pines represent continuance, then cottonwood leaves show me how the illusion of time punctuates space, how we fill those dusty, gaseous voids with escapades of life and death, dropping the tiny spans of human days into them.
This morning I found a yearling heifer, bred by a fence-jumping bull out of season, trying to calve. I saw her high up on a sage-covered slope, lying down, flicking her tail, and thought she must have colic. But I was wrong. The calf’s front feet and head had already pushed out, who knows how many hours before, and it was dead.
I walked her down the mountain to the calving shed, where a friend, Ben, and I winched the dead calf out. We doctored the heifer for uterine infection, and I made a bed of straw, brought fresh creekwater and hay. The heifer ate and rested. By evening she had revived, but by the next morning she seemed to have pneumonia. Twenty cc’s of penicillin later, she worsened. The antibiotics didn’t kick in.
That night she lay down, emitting grunts and high-pitched squeals. The vet came at midnight. We considered every possibility—infection, pneumonia, poisoning—what else could it be? Another day, and her condition worsened. Not any one symptom but a steady decline. I emptied more medicine into her, knowing it was doing no good, but my conscience forbade me to do less. The vet came again and left. He suggested it might be “hardware disease”—a euphemism for an ingested piece of metal, a nail or barbed wire, cutting into her throat or stomach or heart. I put a magnet down her throat. Strange as it seems, it sometimes picks up the metal, taking it all the way through the digestive tract. No response. I sat with her. I played music—Merle Haggard and Mozart—wondering if my presence consoled or irritated her. This was not a cow we had raised, and she seemed unsure of me. Could a calf-puller, a shot-giver, not mean harm?
That afternoon a phone call came telling me my dear friend and mentor in all cowboying skills—“Mike”—had suffered a heart attack. I drove hellbent to the hospital—something told me there wasn’t much time, but when I entered the room, she sat up, elegant as ever, and we embarked on our usual conversation about horses, dogs, cattle, and men. Despite a night of ferocious pain she looked beautiful. After an hour I reluctantly left to let her rest and went home.
There I found the cow had not eaten or taken any water. Her breathing was worse. I lay on the straw beside her and slept. Before coming to the barn I had smelled something acrid—the old, familiar smell of death, although she was still alive. Yet the sounds she made now had changed from grunting to a low moan, the kind of sound one makes when giving in to something. She was dead by nightfall. In the morning a second phone call came. My friend “Mike” had “gone over the ridge.”
Today yellow is combed all through the trees, and the heart-shaped cottonwood leaves spin downward to nothingness. I know how death is made—not why, but where in the body it begins, its lurking presence before the fact, its strangled music as if the neck of a violin were being choked; I know how breathing begins to catch on each rib, how the look of the eye flattens, gives up its depth, no longer sees past itself; I know how easily existence is squandered, how noiselessly love is dropped to the ground.
“You have to mix death into everything,” a painter once told me. “Then you have to mix life into that,” he said as his cigarette ashes dropped onto the palette. “If they are not there, I try to mix them in. Otherwise the painting won’t be human.” I was a child, and his words made me wince because it was my portrait he was painting. I wanted to be a painter at the time—I was twelve, and as far as I knew, death was something in a paint tube, to be squeezed out at will when you wanted to put in meaning.
Days later I walked to the graveyard. On a ranch, death is as much a constant as birth. The heifer was there with her calf, legs stretched out straight, belly bloated … but the white droppings of ravens—who were making a meal of her—cascaded down her rib cage like a waterfall.
I wandered through the scattered bones of other animals who have died. Two carcasses were still intact: Blue’s and Lawyer’s, saddle horses who put in many good years. Manes, tails, hair gone, their skin has hardened to rawhide, dried to a tautness, peeling back just slightly from ribs, noses, and hooves, revealing a hollow interior as if letting me see that the souls are really gone.
After fruition, after death, after black ash, perhaps there is something more, even if it is only the droppings of a scavenger, or bones pointing every which way as if to say, “Touch here, touch here,” and the velocity of the abyss when a loved one goes his way, and the way wind stirs hard over fresh graves, and the emptying out of souls into rooms and the mischief they get into, flipping switches, opening windows, knocking candles out of silver holders, and, after, shimmering on water like leaked gas ready to explode.
Mid-September. Afternoons I paddle my blue canoe across our nine-acre lake, letting water take me where it will. The canoe was a gift: eight dollars at the local thrift store.
As I drift aimlessly, ducks move out from the reeds, all mallards. Adaptable, omnivorous, and hardy, they nest here every year on the two tiny islands in the lake. After communal courtship and mating, the extra male ducks are chased away, but this year one stayed behind. Perhaps he fathered a clutch on the sly or was too young to know where else to go. When the ducklings hatched and began swimming, he often tagged along, keeping them loosely together until the official father sent him away. Then he’d swim the whole circumference of the lake alone, too bewildered and dignified to show defeat.
A green net of aquatic weeds knots the water, holding and releasing me as if I were weightless, as if I were loose change. Raised on the Pacific, I can row a boat, but I hardly know how to paddle. The water is either ink or a clear, bloodless liquid, and the black water snakes that writhe as I guide the canoe are trying to write words.
Evening. In Kyoto I was once taken to a moon-viewing room atop an ancient house on temple grounds. The room was square, and the windows on four sides were rice-paper cutouts framed by bamboo, rounds split down the center, allowing the viewer to re-create the moon’s phase. To view the moon, one had to look through the moon of the window.
Tonight the lake is a mirror. The moon swims across. Every now and then I slide my paddle into its face. Last week I saw the moon rise twice in one night: once, heavy and orange—a harvest moon—heaving over the valley, and later, in the mountains, it was rising small, tight, and bright. Back in August the moon went blind. One night I sat outside with a bottle of wine and watched a shade pull across its difficult, cratered solitude.
Now with September almost gone, a half-moon slants down light and shadows move desolation all over the place. At dawn a flicker knocks. The hollow sound of his labor makes leaves drop in yellow skirts around the trunks of trees. Water bends daylight. Thoughts shift like whitecaps, wild and bitter. My gut is a harp. Its strings get plucked in advance of any two-way communication by people I love, so that I know when attentions wane or bloom, when someone dear goes from me.
Tonight thin spines of boreal light pin down thoughts as if skewered on the ends of thrown quills. I’m trying to understand how an empty tube behind a flower swells to fruit, how leaves twisting from trees are pieces of last year’s fire spoiling to humus. Now trees are orange globes, their brightness billowing into cumulus clouds. As the sun rises, the barometer drops. Wind swings around, blasting me from the east, and every tin roof on the ranch shudders to a new tune.
Stripped of leaves, stripped of love, I run my hands over my single wound and remember how one man was like a light going up inside me, not flesh. Wind comes like horn blasts: the whole mountain range is gathered in one breath. Leaves keep coming off trees as if circulating through a fountain; steep groves of aspens glow.
I search for the possible in the impossible. Nothing. Then I try for the opposite, but the yellow leaves in trees—shaped like mouths—just laugh. Tell me, how can I shut out the longing to comprehend?
Wind slices pondswells, laying them sharp and flat. I paddle and paddle. Rain fires into the water all around me, denting the mirror. The pond goes colorless. Where the warm spring feeds in, a narrow lane has been cut through aquatic flowers to the deep end. I slide my canoe into the channel. Tendrils of duckweed wave green arms. Are they saying hello or good-bye?
Willows, clouds, and mountains lie in the lake’s mirror, although they look as if they’re standing. I dip my paddle and slide over great folds of time, through lapping depositions of memory, over Precambrian rock, then move inward, up a narrow gorge where a hidden waterfall gleams. After fruition, after death, water mirrors water.
The canoe slides to shore, and I get out. A cloud tears, letting sun through, then closes again. I get down on my hands and knees and touch my tongue to water: the lake divides. Its body is chasm after chasm. Like water, I have no skin, only surface tension. How exposed I feel. Where a duck tips down to feed, one small ripple causes random turbidity, ceaseless chaos, and the lake won’t stop breaking. I can punch my finger through anything.…
Much later, in the night, in the dark, I shine a flashlight down: my single wound is a bright scar that gives off hooked light like a new moon.
I try to cut things out of my heart, but the pack rat who has invaded my study won’t let me. He has made himself the curator of my effects, my despair, my questioning, my memory. Every day a new show is installed. As if courting, he brings me bouquets of purple aster and sage gone to seed, cottonwood twigs whose leaves are the color of pumpkins. His scat is scattered like black rain: books, photographs, manuscripts are covered. The small offerings I set out years ago when I began using this room—a fistful of magpie feathers and the orange husks of two tangerines—have been gnawed into. Only the carved stone figure of a monk my mother gave me during tumultuous teenage years stands solid. The top of the narrow French desk where I write is strewn with cactus paddles—all lined up end to end—as if to remind me of how prickly the practice of vandalizing one’s consciousness can be, how what seems inexpressible is like a thorn torn off under the skin.
The pack rat keeps me honest, and this is how: He reminds me that I’ve left something out. The summer after the fire, I returned to Yellowstone Park. I wanted to begin again in barrenness, I wanted to understand ash. This time the carcasses were gone—some eaten by bears, coyotes, eagles, and ravens; others taken away by the Park. Those charnel grounds where only a green haze of vegetation showed had become tall stands of grass. And the bison—those who survived—were fat.
In a grassland at the northern end of the Park I stood in fairy rings of ash where sagebrush had burned hot, and saw how mauve-colored lupine seeds had been thrown by twisted pods into those bare spots. At the edges were thumbnail-sized sage seedlings. Under a stand of charred Douglas firs was a carpet of purple asters and knee-high pine grass, in bloom for the first time in two hundred years—its inflorescence stimulated by fire. I saw a low-lying wild geranium that appears only after a fire, then goes into dormancy again, exhibiting a kind of patience I know nothing of. In another blackened stand of trees it was possible to follow the exact course of the burn by stepping only where pine grass was in flower: ground fire had moved like rivulets of water. In places where the fire burned hottest there was no grass, because the organic matter in the soil had burned away, but there were hundreds of lodgepole pine seedlings; the black hills were covered with pink fireweed.
Just when all is black ash, something new happens. Ash, of course, is a natural fertilizer, and now it’s thought to have a water-holding capacity: black ground is self-irrigating in a self-regulating universe. How quickly “barrenness becomes a thousand things and so exists no more.”
Now it’s October. On the pond again, I hear water clank against the patched hull. It is my favorite music, like that made by halyards against aluminum masts. It is the music emptiness would compose if emptiness could change into something. The seat of my pants is wet because the broken seat in the canoe is a sponge holding last week’s rainwater. All around me sun-parched meadows are green again.
In the evening the face of the mountain looks like a ruined city. Branches stripped bare of leaves are skeletons hung from a gray sky, and next to them are tall buildings of trees still on fire. Bands and bars of color are like layers of thought, moving the way stream water does, bending at point bars, eroding cutbanks. I lay my paddle down, letting the canoe drift. I can’t help wondering how many ways water shapes the body, how the body shapes desire, how desire moves water, how water stirs color, how thought rises from land, how wind polishes thought, how spirit shapes matter, how a stream that carves through rock is shaped by rock.
Now the lake is flat, but the boat’s wake—such as it is—pushes water into a confusion of changing patterns, new creations: black ink shifting to silver, and tiny riptides breaking forward-moving swells.
I glide across rolling clouds and ponder what my astronomer friend told me: that in those mysterious moments before the Big Bang there was no beginning, no tuning up of the orchestra, only a featureless simplicity, a stretch of emptiness more vast than a hundred billion Wyoming skies. By chance this quantum vacuum blipped as if a bar towel had been snapped, and resulted in a cosmic plasma that fluctuated into and out of existence, finally moving in the direction of life.
“But where did the bar towel come from?” I asked my friend. He laughed. No answer. Somehow life proceeded from artlessness and instability, burping into a wild diversity that follows no linear rules. Yet in all this indeterminacy, life keeps opting for life. Galactic clouds show a propensity to become organic, not inorganic, matter; carbon-rich meteorites have seeded our earthly oasis with rich carbon-based compounds; sea vents let out juvenile water warm enough to generate growth, and sea meadows brew up a marine plasma—matter that is a thousandth of a millimeter wide—and thus give rise to all plant life and the fish, insects, and animals with which it coevolved.
I dip my paddle. The canoe pivots around. Somewhere out there in the cosmos, shock waves collapsed gas and dust into a swirl of matter made of star grains so delicate as to resemble smoke, slowly aggregating, gradually sweeping up and colliding with enough material to become a planet like ours.
Dusk. A bubble of cloud rises over the mountain. It looks like the moon, then a rock tooth pierces it, and wind burnishes the pieces into soft puffs of mist. Forms dissolve into other forms: a horsehead becomes a frog; the frog becomes three stick figures scrawled across the sky. I watch our single sun drop. Beyond the water, a tree’s yellow leaves are hung like butter lamps high up near the trunk. As the sun sinks, the tree appears to be lit from the inside.
Another day. Listen, it’s nothing fancy. Just a man-made pond in the center of the ranch, which is at the northern, mountainous edge of a desolate state. And it’s fall, not too much different from the last fourteen autumns I’ve lived through here, maybe warmer at times, maybe windier, maybe rainier. I’ve always wondered why people sit at the edge of water and throw rocks. Better to toss stones at the car that brought you, then sit quietly.
This lake is a knowing eye that keeps tabs on me. I try to behave. Last summer I swam in its stream of white blossoms, contemplating “the floating life.” Now I lie on its undulant surface. For a moment the lake is a boat sliding hard to the bottom of a deep trough, then it is a lover’s body reshaping me. Whenever I try to splice discipline into my heart, the lake throws diamonds at me, but I persist, staring into its dangerous light as if into the sun. On its silvered surface I finally locate desire deep in the eye, to use Wallace Stevens’s words, “behind all actual seeing.”
Now wind pinches water into peaked roofs as if this were a distant city at my feet. I slide my canoe onto one of the tiny, humpbacked islands. The rind of earth at water’s edge shows me where deer have come to drink and ducks have found shelter. It’s not shelter I seek, but a way of going to the end of thought.
I sit the way a monk taught me: legs crossed, hands cupped, thumbs touching, palms upward. The posture has a purpose, but the pose, as it must appear to the onlooker, is a ruse, because there is no such thing as stillness, since life progresses by vibration—the constant flexing and releasing of muscles, the liquid pulse, the chemical storms in the brain. I use this island only to make my body stop, this posture to lower the mind’s high-decibel racket.
The ground is cold. All week blasts of Arctic air have braided into lingering warmth. Sometimes a lip of ice grows outward from shore, but afternoon sun burns it back. Water rubs against earth as if trying to make a spark. Nothing. The fountain of leaves in trees has stopped. But how weightless everything appears without the burden of foliage.
At last light, my friend the bachelor duck makes a spin around the lake’s perimeter. When the breeze that sweeps up from the south turns on itself, he swims against the current, dipping out of sight behind a gold-tinged swell. Fruition comes to this, then: not barrenness but lambency.
November 1. The ducks are gone. A lip of ice grew grotesquely fast during the night and now stretches across the water. I can’t sit. Even the desire to be still, to take refuge from despair in the extremes of diversity, to bow down to light, is a mockery. Nothing moves. Looking out across the lake is like viewing a corpse: no resemblance to the living body. I go to the house despondent. When news of the California earthquake comes I think about stillness and movement, how their constant rubbing sparks life and imposes death. Now I don’t know. Now the island is like a wobbly tooth, hung by a fine thread to the earth’s mantle, and the lake is a solid thing, a pane of glass that falls vertically, cutting autumn off like fingers.
A week later. It has snowed, and I’m sitting on the white hump of the island. My thrift-store canoe is hopelessly locked in ice. The frozen lake is the color of my mother’s eyes—slate blue—but without the sparkle. Snow under me, ice at my feet, no mesmerizing continuum of ripples forwarding memory, no moving lines in which to write music. And yet …
I put my nose to the white surface of the lake. It’s the only way I’ll know what I’m facing. At first it looks flat and featureless but closer, I see the ice is dented and pocked, and across the middle, where the water is deepest, there are white splotches radiating arms like starfish.
At midday the barometer drops and the radio carries stockmen’s warnings: high winds and snow, blowing snow in the northern mountains. That’s us. Sure enough the wind comes, but it’s a warm chinook. Rain undulates across the face of the mountains, then turns to snow.
In the morning I go back. Drifts dapple the lake’s surface like sand dunes, and between, dead leaves fly across the ones trapped under ice. But at the north end, where the warm spring feeds in, there is open water—a tiny oval cut like a gem. Something catches my eye: a duck swims out from the reeds, all alone. Is it my bachelor duck? Around and around he goes, climbing onto the lip of ice to face the warm sun.
How fragile death is, how easily it opens back into life. Inside the oval, water ripples, then lies flat. The mirror it creates is so small I can see only a strip of mountains and the duck’s fat chest bulging. I want to call out to him: “Look this way, I’m here too this autumn morning,” but I’m afraid I’ll scare him.
He goes anyway, first sliding into the water, then swimming anxious laps. When he takes off, his head is a green flame. He circles so close I can hear the wing-creak and the rasp of feathers. Over the lake he flies, crossing the spillway and dam bank, then up through a snowy saddle, not south as I would have expected, but northwest, in the direction of oncoming storms.