monotheistic religions, privileging humanityâs relationship with the divine, encourage arrogance. Yet even in that hard soil, poetry will find the language of compassionate fellowship with our fellow beings.
The seventeenth-century Christian mystic Henry Vaughan wrote:
So hills and valleys into singing break,
And though poor stones have neither speech nor tongue,
While active winds and streams both run and speak,
Yet stones are deep in admiration.
By admiration, Vaughan meant reverence for Godâs sacred order of things, and joy in it, delight. By admiration, I understand reverence for the infinite connectedness, the naturally sacred order of things, and joy in it, delight. So we admit stones to our holy communion; so the stones may admit us to theirs.
RELATIONS
The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House
Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt
worn river-smooth all round, a cylinder
with blunt round ends, a tool: you know it when
you feel the subtle central turn or curve
that shapes it to the hand, was shaped by hands,
year after year after year, by womenâs hands
that held it here, just where it must be held
to fall of its own weight into the shallow bowl
and crush the seeds and rise and fall again
setting the rhythm of the soft, dull song
that worked itself at length into the stone,
so when I picked it up it told me how
to hold and heft it, put my fingers where
those fingers were that softly wore it down
to this fine shape that fits and fills my hand,
this weight that wants to fall and, falling, sing.
Incense
for H.F.
The match-flame held to the half-inch block
catches, and I blow it out.
The flame grows and flashes
gold, then shrinks and almost dies
to a drop of spectral blue
that detaches, floats,
a wisp of fire in air, dances
high, a little higher, is gone.
Now
from the incense smouldering
sweet smoke of cedar rises
a while like memory.
Then only ashes.
Kitchen Spoons
New
My spoon of Spanish olive wood
from the Olive Pit in Corning,
Tehama County, California,
just off the I-5,
is light but has a good heft.
Short and well rounded,
the right size to stir with,
itâs at home in my hand.
Matte brown of olive meat,
dark streaks like olive skin,
its grain is clear and fluent.
The grain of a wood
is the language of the tree.
I oil the spoon with olive oil
and it tells me grey-green leaves,
brief fragrant blossom-foam,
tough life, deep roots, long years.
Spain that I have never seen.
California, and summer, summer.
Old
My plated steel mixing spoon
is from our first apartment,
on Holt Avenue in Macon,
Georgia, in 1954, the downstairs
of widow Killianâs house, furnished
with her furniture and kitchenware.
An ordinary heavy tablespoon,
plain, with a good balance,
the left side of the end of the bowl
misshapen, worn away
by decades, maybe a century,
of a right-handed person
mixing and beating with it.
First Mrs Killian, then me.
I liked it so well that when we moved
I asked her could I take it.
That old thing? My goodness, yes,
with a soft laugh,
take it if you want it, child.
Earthenware
Old clay pot
stained brown
cooked a lot
used to be
full of beans
in the oven
over and over
washed clean
time and again
baked clay
some day
had to crack
bones words
pot-shards
all go back
Kinship
Very slowly burning, the big forest tree
stands in the slight hollow of the snow
melted around it by the mild, long
heat of its being and its will to be
root, trunk, branch, leaf, and know
earth dark, sun light, wind touch, bird song.
Rootless and restless and warmblooded, we
blaze in the flare that blinds us to that slow,
tall, fraternal fire of life as strong
now as in the seedling two centuries ago.
Western Outlaws
I celebrate sagebrush,
scrub-oak, digger pine, juniper,
the despised and rejected
or grudgingly accepted
because nothing else grows here.
Theyâre the ones who wonât give in
to us, ornament our