garden,
be furniture, or food,
and firewood only in a pinch
because nothing else grows here.
Theirs is the dour hardihood
of growing on serpentine and hardpan
with little or no water but what you steal
from your nextdoor neighbors,
so that nothing else grows here
I celebrate the gnarled cranky stem,
grey-green pungent leaf or scaly needle,
heavy cone, bitter berry, tiny blossom,
and the grand, rank smell of cat-spray,
since nothing else grows here.
Citizens of a hard and somewhat toxic land,
unsociable, undocile, willful,
they share nothing, yet they clothe
a naked indigent soil with life,
growing where nothing else grows, here.
The Canada Lynx
We know how to know and how to think,
how to exhibit what is known
to heavenâs bright ignorant eye,
how to be busy and to multiply.
He knows how to walk
into the trees alone not looking back,
so light on his soft feet he does not sink
into the snow. How to leave no track,
no sound, no shadow. How to be gone.
The One Thing Missing
Finally the fireflies came across the Rockies, drifting
on damp, soft breezes blowing westward
that lifted them over the salt and poisoned deserts
and the terrible white-toothed Sierra
to the quietness of California valleys
where I saw them in a dream from the verandah
of Kishamish, all the little airy fires
coming and going in the summer dusk nearby
and farther in the forests toward the mountain
glimmering in the darkness ever finer, fainter,
meadows of innumerable motes of silver.
CONTEMPLATIONS
In Ashland
Across the creek stood a tall complex screen
of walnut and honey-locust branch and leaf.
In a soft autumn sunrise without wind
my daughter in meditation on the deck
above the quietly loquacious creek
observed a multitude of small
yellow birds among the many leaves
coming and going quick as quick
into sight and out of sight again.
She said to me, they were
like thoughts moving in a mind,
the little birds among the many leaves.
My House
I have built a house in Time,
my home province. Up in the hills
not far from the city, it looks west
over fields, vineyards, wild lands
to the shore of the Eternal. Many years
went to building it as I wanted it to be,
the sleeping porches, the shady rooms,
the inner gardens with their fountains.
Above the front door, a word in a language
as yet unknown may perhaps mean Praise.
Windows are open to the summer air.
In winter rain patters in the courtyards
and in the basins of the fountains
and gathers to drip from the deep eaves.
Contemplation at McCoy Creek
Seeking the sense within the word, I guessed:
To be there in the sacred place,
the temple. To witness fully, and be thus
the altar of the thing witnessed.
In shade beside the creek I contemplate
how the great waters coming from the heights
early this summer changed the watercourse.
The four big midstream boulders stayed in place.
The willows are some thriving and some dead,
rooted in, uprooted by the flood.
Over the valley in the radiant light
a raven takes its way from east to west;
shadow wings across the rimrock pass
as silent as the raven. Contemplation
shows me nothing discontinuous.
When I looked in the book I found:
Time is the templeâTime itself and Spaceâ
observed, marked out, to make the sacred place
on the four-quartered sky, the inwalled ground.
To join in continuity, the mind
follows the water, shadows the birds,
observes the unmoved rock, the subtle flight.
Slowly, in silence, without words,
the altar of the place and hour is raised.
Self is lost, a sacrifice to praise,
and praise itself sinks into quietness.
Constellating
Mind draws the lines between the stars
that let the Eagle and the Swan
fly vast and bright and far
above the dark before the dawn.
Between two solitary minds
as far as Deneb from Altair,
love flings the unimaginable line
that marries fire to fire.
Hymn to Time
Time says âLet there beâ
every moment and instantly
there