Fourteen Poems

Aphasia

A man of about seventy years of age sits at a table holding a pencil in his hand. It is cradled between his fingers as though he is preparing to write with it. “What is this?" a woman asks, pointing to the pencil from across the table. “Uh, it's a wedge for the rain...?" he replies with a sort of questioning tone, and moves it in a vague writing gesture. “What do you use it for?" the lady continues. “...For the rain to scretch," he answers. “Very good," she responds.

 from The Symbolic Species, Terrence W. Deacon

1

A stroke has altered our patient's speech,

an absence of blood has starved it. Dry

and unremitting, the absence expresses

itself on command, with every lilting

intension. An entire, if isolated, world

ensues. Think of a ship in the Galapagos,

of Darwin scribbling in meticulous logs,

of the pilgrim at the grail of necessity.

So absence commands its lexicon,

a wrong but familiar order of words,

a species of speech borne, by storms,

to a separated island. There it quickly

diverges, evolving to suit its habitat,

to carve a niche out of niches.

(These caverns, this absence, are all

that remain: the island is water: mirage.)

2

There is the mistake of interpretation;

our patient depends on his error.

His “questioning tone" is to him a new

music, “the lilting intension" a spree.

Our patient has suffered immensely--

not only his fall, his symptom,

but the world that precedes the disease.

Health was always his nemesis,

his many blessings his curse.

There was always slippage, the oblong

silences filling with breath, and

the bloodless center (left hemisphere,

temporal lobe) obscure. Remember:

there is a life he longs to retrieve,

inexactly, devoutly, it's true. His faith

in his speech spans every rupture,

3

and sutures the gashes that nothing

can heal. Disease redefines his terms.

While “a wedge for the rain" rings true

for outsiders, for him it is essential.

“A vague writing gesture" may very well be

a precise and mysterious venture. This,

for our patient, is the crux, is the accident

of his calling. He beseeches the world

with every mistake. Ownership, origin,

passionate speech: our blood rises gently

inside. While a world away he survives,

a variant right beside us. Aphasia

is a place, equatorial, calm. Exotica

thrive in this Eden, and hot storms swirl

around a dead eye. There he names the world

as he pleases, exquisite in his need.

Prophet

When the pious fall from the mountain like sated fleas,

when the loggers spit their last tobacco in the innocent salal,

when the woods are empty of the equal curses sacred, profane,

then his words will emit their real ramifications, like fungus

spreading its mycelial net, its ripe body in the soil. Until then,

he's hidden. He slumps like a fern, scrapes his knuckles

on bark. He slips in his cheap shoes on the slick lobaria.

Sooty from his fire, he falters among boles nine centuries old.

He's forgotten how as a young man he first saw lightning,

no longer abstract, score a fir with black spirals. Now

it's all routine: sound and silence as categories, no nuance

in between. The ouzel, no longer an angel, dips mechanically

in the creek, while salamanders deliver their young unseen.

Though tourists and murderous officials lurk beyond the trees,

though animals are assigned numbers this time, not names,

the prophet is still: no savior to announce, and nothing so colorful

as apocalypse. Pausing among the firs, he's surprisingly slight,

like a thorn, or a comet, or the owl's body beneath its down.

Delusion

A little soup

would be appropriate.

We are sick, and our parents are far-flung,

victims of plate tectonics, sad

recipients of acid rain. Their suffering

is behind us now, and our lives

unfold like unforeseeable insects,

grotesque. A moment ago

I wondered if brothers and sisters

are variations of each other,

if, then, cousins and animals and palm trees

are variations of each other, if

light might be a variation of fog,

or the desert an altered sea.

It turns out I'm right,

that even science agrees,

that my own family is as distant

as steppes or tundra, and as near as the phallic pine cones

scattered under my tree. It turns out

that a nativity occurs nightly,

that dumb kings gather around my bed,

humming while I sleep. It turns out that I'm responsible

for all this, that my confusion

is the chaos of nature, my ego

the invisible dome

that holds up the jungle canopy,

sustains the thin blue sphere.

A Large Garage

The first snows had blanketed

Newberry Crater, and

Paulina Peak was transfixed.

Paulina Lake was turquoise and green,

and olive in the depths

where German browns were slowing,

bobbing in their sleep. Kokanee

swayed in the outlet creek, sluggish,

and died. Then ravens had their way,

leaving tracks like arrows

and burgundy stains in the snow.

The world was sleeping, all falling to sleep, oh,

and the part of the earth that is all-inclusive

wanted me to know. Was it only a scene,

everything, the ducks and the pines,

right down to the scent of snow,

the promise of cruelty in the air?

The problem from the first was my love

of scenarios,  absurdities in sequence

that I called my life. I turned to paintings:

as with Degas' dancers, the moment

was rendered so vividly

that history, in a fit of rapture, fled.

Left here afloat, I can only observe

as the girl in the tutu spins. Now all I can love

is this theater, as absurdities spill out

to the street. Alone and uncertain,

I walk among rows of garreted houses,

each turret smothered in autumn maples.

A man is urinating behind a tree,

singing, and a large garage is harboring

a green and secret jeep. Drivers

in their darkened cars, moist amidst upholstery,

and warm among their metals:

these are the sinister,

comic in their search for meaning

as they clutch and shift and marvel,

enclosed in a world that is not their own.

Pity

Shine a light on a fire and it's a pitiful thing.

Or lay a highway through a forest,

and the occasional car splits the night

like something otherworldly.

I'm wandering the Umpqua boulders,

cleaning trout in a pool, 

burning corn, burning wet wood.

I'm hearing my little baby's cries in the river.

What I think is a grebe is a gray root.

What I hear in the trees

is my own jaw creaking. I require pity:

we all still live under the sky.

Cockpits, oxygenated

and dimly lit, are only wombs

in the blue animal's womb.

Even the moon: it was flung from us

in an ancient collision, held in orbit by physical

bonds. Pity appears spontaneously

out of indifferent stuff, just as in our innocence,

when pearly maggots emerged

from piles of greasy rags.

The Aesthetics of the Hunt

October sunlight is listing in the trees.

Late ospreys turn and plummet,

stabbing the waters and lifting out fish.

All this time I've walked inside language,

insisting I'm free, while the lake

is slowly choked with rubble,

while men and boys, eternally lonely,

fire their rifles in the woods.

Words as material as the curl of a pod

spill from me in chaotic song.

I sing the hunt, and the tunnels

that rabbits gnaw, and the scraped bark

marking a border.  I hum the scampered-down

entrances to dens, and my song runs long,

where the fox can't follow.  As sugars block

the tiny gates to maple stems,

as the cells in cones sense the dry weather

and relax their grips on seeds,

as the red anthocyanin in woodrush and fescue

screens them from the sun,

so I too have my meek strategies,

even as I greet, over open ground,

a camouflaged hunter waving his gun.

Pornography

All creation is a project: the wilderness a garden,

and sex merchandise. We like having a project,

unlinking our words from the physical world,

maybe just for fun. But the single moment pushes out,

crowning, and the world dilates,

not because we will it,

but because it must. Certain animals emerge,

clothed only in feathers and hair. 

Desire is metonymy,

so we want eros, we want suckle: 

we want the earth. Even if colonial lust

has begotten it, there is an Eden of the moment.

So cast out, there are women,

and they hunch in eroded soil. Oxen

and caribou enter the cities at night. There: 

only men, their genitalia elegantly hidden. There

the adolescent courses through empty rooms,

like an androgynous moon and sun.

All thought is drunk by the sun,

reduced to the salt and chemicals

of its origin. One might walk incessantly,

as one always has, but without thinking,

strictly, of anything. Eventually rain

exposes a fossil snail, an artifact

of pure sex: rhythm and exchange,

and the turn inward, toward the pin-point

of becoming. A few millennia later, look:

the yellow-humped boulders

have formed tombs upon the snails.

In that landscape of privacy,

I project myself onto others,

whatever sex or species suits me,

and hop off to the half-light in the cave. 

I'm mobile. Something of the body,

unmediated, is urging me on. 

I respond like an animal,

like a limousine. I'm the alpha: 

I'm free of time. I'm the sweet no one

you love.










Misreading Anna Akhmatova

This is how it happens: a feeling of tranquility;

clocks strike incessantly in my ears;

in the distance the thunder dies down.

                                                            --Akhmatova, “The Secrets of the Craft"

But what clocks and what thunder

we'll never know. I miss your meaning,

favoring instead the specific clock,

carved as it is with owls and crude

feathers, and hiding ivory birds

behind doors. Birds hidden in time,

and time rendered in wood,

a time we can understand, unlike

the time in rocks or in cesium,

appeal to me. As for dying thunder:

your words affect me like that.

It's a mood, the moment

the storm fades, neither

nostalgia nor remorse,

but more like a pine, the needles,

having shunted the brutal light,

calmly returning to black.

Pastoral

The dogwood is angelic,

despite your protests. If it pleases you, then,

it's pastoral, and if you had a hand

in its beauty, it's beautiful.

But who posed this question of the dogwood,

you have to ask. And then wander the woodlots

in search of an answer. It's hopelessly old fashioned,

but there's something to 

the symmetry of trees,

something more than the dappled 

halves of an equation.

It provokes you to assert the impossible again,

and in this way you repeat yourself--

I mean you regenerate yourself--

your romantic body, fed by romantic proteins,

clones its romantic cells, and branches

in a pasture you'll never see. 










Our Makeshift Houses

The trees are thinning with their usual exactness,

and autumn's iambic clock

has wound all down.

A cold front comes on,

and a storm the size of a dime

opens the mountain sky.

Soon snowfields writhe beneath their own weight,

and a line of firs is halved by an avalanche,

and an elk comes plodding,

breasting the snow. Soon we know

we're suited to this storm,

we match its intensity with our mammalian will,

the sum of meshing pressures,

of the young Cascades

bowing under ice. Soon we'll crouch,

subject to the sky, shaking

in our makeshift houses.

The creeks will turn feverish,

and the soil offer up its lonely nitrogen,

and our children sleep on mats of humus

and roots. Our houses, new

and elegant as empty trees, will allow

the wind and the light,

allow the storm's undeniable density,

the icy factors that crest and fall,

and our lives, slow

and transparent,

will allow and allow and allow. 

Home, Thought Odysseus


Home, thought Odysseus, is just another stop

on this rolling sea of terrors.

Worse than just another stop: home,

relentlessly identical, grinds hope to a dust

that drifts over state lines.

For every city I wander through, pastel

or gray, and each island adorned with orchards,

the filthy bays dotted with boats,

seems charged with its own death-like energy,

a current nearly dead in the walls and bark,

but present, and sustained so that no one discerns it,

like locust eggs enduring the years.

When the muse eludes us she arrives just here,

dormant in the hollow cells. Calls

won't rouse her, nor will entreaties, false in their elegance,

distract her from her covenant with death.

In death-like spaces she accommodates us,

but only in silence, her hand too steady as she pours our tea.

Home, thought Odysseus, is the crate of spices

carried dry over the sea, the jars

of undiluted oil. A trick of wood, an uncanny ship:

a displacement of water, the body,

home. An annoying knot

falls open at last, and

a hulk slips from its moorage,

receding over the lacquered sea.

Take

He could name each ornamental

that the landscapers planned in their pastoral zeal.

And he'd call to the birds happening through,

nod knowingly at the mushrooms

that peek from the duff. Given enough time,

he could catalogue the Saturnian rings

that circle his body, each species

twirling like ice. He could lapse into a trance

in which all motion ascends and descends--

not objects, but motion itself repeatedly plummeting

like waves in a substanceless ocean.

It's a wonderful hell, amoral, sans

suffering, but hell nonetheless for the sentence:

never to gaze upon god's stiff face. Still,

he could perch on a cliff of air,

look down upon the atomic frenzy. And feeling

the ecstasy of removal, he could negotiate

this neutral hell, delve in the valleys, or rise

on the slopes of thermal mountains

like a vulture buoyed by death. He could

in fact penetrate death with his naked head

and neck, and this would be his erotic secret,

the source of his powers and his shame.

As the oak proclaims itself with its own lobed

leaves, clandestine and open to the sun, so

he might regard himself as self-evident,

self-descriptive, complete. A few square yards of soil

might sustain him for a lifetime. A minute amount

of rain, really, and few more resources

than an animal requires. Sure: he'll help himself

from shelves in the earth. Nature will serve

him masterfully. Separate from the chaos of hunger,

faint in the thralls of art,

he'll be possessed by an ardor unlike anything

he's known. He'll lie awake all night regarding a statue,

something animalesque. When dawn

interrupts his reverie, he'll address the sun formally,

in awe of its dome. He'll speak in sleepy sentences

of cathedrals, of planetary gestures,

of a light over cities

that augurs their demise.

The Landscape Painter

She shows me the underpaintings, the brush-strokes,

and all the values involved.

A little light here against the darkness,

she says, and all is forgiven.

In the water there are shivers of black, just here,

and in a gully, the shadow is definite-- all the earth,

she says, is being eclipsed.

It's just a matter of rendering the degrees.

As when we make love, in the afternoons,

as when we shade each other's bodies,

as when I ask,

is this what you mean by eclipse.

Seeing her astride me is like watching a heron lift--

I'm awed at her slowness, her width,

at the pull of her muscles beneath her plumage,

at her awkward gratitude

for her own gift. And I know that birds

and wind and soil find their own way,

in spite of us. If we submit,

we are shaped by streams more powerful

than even our own stupidity.

Once on the Umpqua River,

I stood over the slow apparition of a steelhead.

It showed me its huge flank,

spotted and gleaming, and a band of violet

like a dusk sky. So I can believe in nothing more than a canvas,

or a fish's side. I can believe in a two-dimensional world,

even as I yearn for the moment it tilts,

becoming almost full. The blue marbled globe

is still only an image to us,

we who've travelled so far.

The earth is still flat and translucent,

hinting at what's beyond. But there's a process of osmosis,

fluids moving through miraculous walls,

and there's a distance as flat as perspective,

where everything exists, in reality,

on a single plane. So I'm urging lines

and terraces of color. I'm urging rivers

and granite shelves. I'm urging the striated joy

that animals know, and I'm urging

their gestures. When the painting is complete, she says,

you'll know it by an almost inaudible sigh. All form

will fall away. You'll look at your world

and cock your head. You'll suddenly crave salt.

You'll be proud and glad at being a mammal.

You'll go and wash your hands and hair.

Bidding the Child Goodbye

Maybe you're tired of these thresholds.

Maybe you're tired of clinging to the doorjamb like a guest.

Maybe we usher you to just this point,

then swoop up, maybe

skirting the sky, but at any rate

leaving you, as always. And who taught us to value flight, if

not the clumsy, earthbound philosophers?

Birds themselves are nonchalant

about the virtues of the sky,

preferring seed or insects to grace,

liking their own techniques to nothing but wings

and bills and dipping tails: blissfully

sufficient bodies, eschewing,

with pure action instead of intent,

the spiritual sky. So you're thinking

you want to cross lines,

enter deeply into a world in reality so shallow it could hardly contain you, 
like a leafy closet, or horizontally,

a stratified coffin of rock.

You long for a touch on the arm and a phrase that might introduce you, politely,

to your imagined swirling persona,

a human turning like a slow cyclone

among ferns and drooping orchids.

The forest seems endless, and metaphors

of the heart keep occurring,

organically, of their own accord.

Ropes and hemp mats are scattered in a clearing,

and here and there are signs of exquisite basketry.

Even the clay curls up from the ground,

suggesting vessels. Fleas

and alabaster-colored ants move freely, of their own accord,

among mammals and debris.

A few oddly unmelodic birds

conceal themselves in the trees.

You've entered your imagined cave of nature, peopled

as it is with unfathomable life.

You've created the world, beginning

with light. The sky is finally the limit,

a lit and rounded wall. Remember as we leave you here

that we love you,

that we forgive you every error, that you

are the terror of our generation,

and that we'll always love you,

because nothing can stop you now.