The Old Mule

Not Dead Yet

Late March - thoughts before supper

Interesting weeks, behind and ahead. The colors are different, sounds bright, hues of Spring and the edge-of-the-field-walk shoes hung on a nail by the door. Forfeit rent deposit. But wine, good music, hard dust days making things from soil, getting out in it all, roll your socks in a cloud when they fall. A real shower. A country bath - the kind you need to get dirt off, not to knock smoke out your hair, ketchup from your wrist, to warm up with. That's a City Shower. Country Bath: clean a man for sleeping in his sack with a lady. But not too clean. Hard enough to know that tomorrow might not be what you thought; hard enough to fall in to another's arms like you have lept from a cliff. Enough chatter. The good earners are sophists and curls, pink wristed muskrats with the gait of a skittering bat. Be a ball fisted bull, but do it gently, do it with grace. We should lift each other up with great pops to the chin. Life is too short to mock the adventurous. Pull up the acnhors, gentlemen, it is high time we make waves.

New Cut Roads

It was the last night
of the terrible green carpet
motel, aisles and aisles
of northwest rain-mist
lonesomeness, closets of
wasted weeks laid up here
drunk, in regret, in refuge.

I had been left for someone
smarter, saw the note stuck to
our antique record player.
My boots were plagued
with unshakable musk.

Nothing was left but the truck
So I let down the window
and prayed cold would scald
the stone weight of two
into one, unbend the fueled
out harp of a body soaked
in the chemicals of sad youth,
bad time, good sense splayed out
over the black tar grips of Oregon.

Bend County, halfway to Eugene,
camped on the bottom slope
of the worst place on earth. And finally
letters, one, another from my buddy
in the east, saying come back
to the Blue Ridge, that ain’t home.

But I drove through Portland anyway
to clear the air, sped past the Dalles
into Washington – Tacoma,
Seattle, the great cold-green
peninsula, tall wrapped pines
in webs of moss, roots an anchor
from Indian names and frost.

Bobby the criminal and his girl
put me up while I sorted life out
just enough to head East, made
peace with how fucked up
things had gotten. But I had books
and a change of clothes, and nothing
better to prepare a man for the fall
than going ahead and living a part of it.

Nature

Anyone who knows me knows that Gary Snyder is my favorite poet. So this came to me wrapped up like a birthday gift. And I am getting old, though who isn't, and I'm not sure I would stay here forever even if I could. The day is nice out. I am going out for a walk later, maybe get a drink of water and go down to the park with a pen and paper. There are few things left to write about, but they are the ones that must be told.

"At Tower Peak" by Gary Snyder from No Nature.

At Tower Peak

Every tan rolling meadow will turn into housing
Freeways are clogged all day
Academies packed with scholars writing papers
City people lean and dark
This land most real
As its western-tending golden slopes
And bird-entangled central valley swamps
Sea-lion, urchin coasts
Southerly salmon-probes
Into the aromatic almost-Mexican hills
Along a range of granite peaks
The names forgotten,
An eastward running river that ends out in desert
The chipping ground-squirrels in the tumbled blocks
The gloss of glacier ghost on a slab
Where we wake refreshed from ten hours sleep
After a long day's walking
Packing burdens to the snow
Wake to the same old world of no names,
No things, new as ever, rock and water,
Cool dawn birdcalls, high jet contrails.
A day or two or million, breathing
A few steps back from what goes down
In the current realm.
A kind of ice age, spreading, filling valleys
Shaving soils, paving fields, you can walk in it
Live in it, drive through it then
It melts away
For whatever sprouts
After the age of
Frozen hearts. Flesh-carved rock
And gusts on the summit,
Smoke from forest fires is white,
The haze above the distant valley like a dusk.
It's just one world, this spine of rock and streams
And snow, and the wash of gravels, silts
Sands, bunchgrasses, saltbrush, bee-fields,
Twenty million human people, downstream, here below.

Think of Winter

Think of
wind cold winter,
camellias in
clear white flames.

Inside stretched out
over maps of mountains,
tea in bed after the sun,
before fire.

Our world is fright,
drought, snow,
water, water.

But we are
bathed lobsters
under wool blankets
with a stack of garden
books, poems.

This is our adjustment,
our spear. Life can not
be all terror.

Let the heat
boil, we hide
from our neighbors
and debtors beneath
rolls and rolls of cloth.

Find us. Our plans
abound.