The following was meant for a book project that seems like it might have been scuttled. Some books are never ready. Most of my poems seem never to be either. But like noodles and bread, they maybe don’t need to be finished to be done enough. And if done enough isn’t, I’d never be able to hand anything in.
Where hard surface meets raw sky
the high country floats sovereign to itself.
To be with the clouds here is to know
a terrible power, in the old way.
Abandoned by the meadow's benevolence,
clung to by an electric yearning.
Thunder so hard it comes from inside me,
lightning leaping out of my eyes.
Torrents of pelting ice
bow me over like a mountain violet.
I came here new once, and all of the place was a fright.
Granite contours guided my hands and I became less afraid.
I kept coming until the strange place became familiar.
A story:
The old gods put their hands
in the new world
and turned it inside out.
Like a sock puppet
the inverted viscera became unctuous domes
and prickly groves—
blood the rivers and still water.
Organs up, a young world folded open,
rich dark earth pushed under.
Far from the center time flows strangely;
dilating and pooling. A body ages quickly.
Once upon returning it was remarked
I looked just like a beleaguered soldier
back from the front.
But through an ancient face peered
the bewildered eyes of a child.
Remember cyanotype—
those sheets of blue paper you play with in the sun
—catching auras of pebbles and leaves?
Tuolumne blue sky etches memories this way.
You, with a will to capture,
find yourself a captive;
an impression painted in light webs,
the medium between spaces.
A silhouette leaning over retraced steps.
A different story:
Laboring in the heavens
the old gods pulled draw knives through shrieking stars.
Scrolls of molten crystal rained down like candle drippings
cooling into sharp peaks and toothy crests.
Cascading embers hardening into erratic figurines;
boulders bejeweled in feldspar.
Woolf describes one macerated
until only the nerve fibers are left...
spread like a veil upon a rock.
Just so I became a veil
hung in a hanging forest
of weathered juniper and mountain hemlock
along Tenaya's flank.
In naive wonder I still tremble there
in front of an impossible task.
I don't recognize myself as I pass.
Too weathered now like those old junipers.
But I see him—skin, rock, in contact—
the strange becoming familiar.