Superstition Canyon
The stone narrows to a dark door.
Here, in seventy-nine,
they chased the Paiutes.
The troopers found no Indians.
Maybe once the air sprung
with an arrow, then with
stillness. There, one rock standing
like a dumb tooth. And the dark
drum of the sky.
Or with clumsy
boots they started a snake from under
clattering rocks. Moving out of darkness.
In the canyon I learn to
move in this silence, with furtive hands
pressed against stone, as slow
as sun moves on the rim of sky.
The Indians took to the mountains.
They learned to live in the snow.
In the canyon, left their sentinels:
hammered on a dark rock, the sun's face,
the white eye and dancing hair.
1965
High Country Poem
1. Rafferty Creek
When you're gone the person stays
I kept in my mind. I have
no exorcism
In the High Country
I walk to drive you out of me
till I've turned my body into one thying
hard as leather and stone
pack-wire
burns on the bone, endure
as dwarf-pine clutches rock
Here, circled, the fire-hole
dangle white feet
in the slow pool
eyes answering that void
where water circles
a hollow in stone
rest the pack and wait
lean into where you left me
the stream falls into the
Lyell Fork, swiftly
Tuolomne, San Joaquin
2. Cathedral Range
Rock stumbles into sky
dim lakes below us, the dreamt
world (we stiffen on the stone
hands above us, circle
the ledge, cross
into a gully,
traverse onto the face
torn ridge 200 feet higher
the highways don't lead here
peak given no name by
Sierra Club or US Survey
you might even keep me
if you came here
though I came here to leave you
and hurt of the yielding flesh
flowering tree
(this has been to tell you
but you are still here,
come like some secret
shadow, branches' edge
crossing touch of vision
one walking behind us
trail ends
some mountain or highway
1966
Sudwesthafen, Hamburg
1.
"amo el amor de los marineros"
Neruda poem
given me in Israel
2.
strange to
walk on the earth. Whales
beneath it
steps touch an inner sound
3.
dark rust concrete, tabby leans and
scratches
herself/ a changing wonderful map of the world
black gray fur. New moon back of
3-ton blind cranes
4.
sailors loving on the Reeperbahn
saying basca, perkkiili.
5,
wander into back dreams
under an empty road west
when I speak Jewish languages the dead say
du bist ein goy
6.
& can't be extricated from
flowers, underwater
cold, smudgy, paper
my face
7.
cathedral serration
wicked sword
to put in a woman
I took peace from someone underground
8.
sailors
come home, saying
devilshit.
1967
Living in the Boneyard
Lime condensed on the printshop ceiling,
or maybe yellow spider eggs
X in yellow chalk
where Pete tried to mark the rain last winter
but it still gets in anyway
got to use inkrags to soak it up
This is living in the Boneyard.
A golden lion of Judah
grins out of the menorah
I never lit this year.
Sleeping bag on the couch
my baby daughter with her mom
Next to my elbow
under scraps of poems
and calls for revolution
the sea is full of dying birds
suck up their curses and breathe on me
again boys, it's
a long way from here to the end
of the world but if you
let your breath out slowly
in the middle
of the last line maybe no one
will notice
1969
I Shook My Grandfather's Hand
I shook my grandfather's hand.
"Well, I'll see you in the other world," he said.
I nodded.
"Yes, on the mountains in the other world."
My grandfather shook his head very slowly.
"There are no mountains in the other world," he said.
1971
Bluejay Medicine
A woman gives a man a bluejay feather,
reflecting blue and barred across three times with black.
He wears it in his gray hat as they walk twelve miles in.
Her contact lens flips from her fingers in windy sun
on the ridge above Pat Springs. They are on their knees
looking, their faces turned to the ground, pushing
chips of sugar-pine bark aside with slow fingers,
long needles, grass, cone scales, dry wood,
scraps of granite, gray and warm brown bark
tumbling over and over underneath.
They have been looking for two hours.
Fuck it, she screams, it's hopeless,
why am I so stupid, I wish I were dead.
She goes crying to tend the cook-fire.
Methodically he has sectioned a tract
eight or ten feet on a side along the vector of wind.
In the hurt he begins to pray. Bluejay
help me find it, bluejay help me find it.
He takes the shining feather and lets it flutter
and searches near where it lands without success.
She come over dry-eyed and bitter and tells him
you don't have to look any more.
He says, I don't want to hear that.
He promises bread and popcorn to Bluejay
in exchange for help. He takes the blue feather
again and gives it to the wind. It sticks
in the brown needles pointing upright.
He approaches slowly. Where the translucent quill
pricks down between layers of pine fragments
the thin circle of plastic sitting on its edge hidden.
From the fire-circle, just before he calls out,
she hears a jaybird talking in the high branches.
1973
