Big Sage Seas


island mountain rises
from the green sage
sea below its rocky slopes
where creeks rush down
to mingle in salt marsh death
surrounded by desert grays
and beige, its toes dipped in sand

unbounded artemisia waves riffling
to distant peaks like sails on the horizon
this ship not alone in the vastness
its spine rising a mile above the placid
waters of dust and spume, as if the sea
were smoke burning all around

the peak— treeless on top— 
implacable shedding monsoonal
winds, clouds tear on the mast
but no albatrosses here--
only vultures and hawks waiting
for small rodents who can never
flee for the desert that hugs the base,
the hull sunk deep into the detritus
of the alluvial plains, stuck fast.





Peering through Fences


my tent next to the chain links
separating lawn and field,
sprinklers and irrigation,
verdure and vetch, 
I peer through at alfalfa stubble,
round bales of hay already
drying— like faces under the sky
almost happy in their ordered 
poses, waiting for the barn

walking past the barbed wire
between old train tracks
and a forest road, abandoned
now, no rumbling tanks
empty without the shouts
and cries of fallen faces
sunken eyes
rusted rails in the sun now

I stand behind the barrier
a barricade holding us back
from the gaping wound
with toxic dust and micro-fine
body fragments mixed in mud
peering inward at the foot-
print of a building

wire and stick fences wavering
on the plain, old horse trails 
imprinted on the pass disappearing 
cattle gone to drought, cowboys
gone too, old fences broken
sagging, I stare at tumbleweeds
circling, collecting with the winds,
the West lies out there
and we on the other side
naked without shade
the wire a thin dividing line
between us and despair.





–all human music has a dying fall
                                                    –Sister Bernetta Quinn (1971)


falling freely from a cliff face
a vertical incompetence
of the rock, mass wasting
a failure of the slope
a dying fall on seedlings
that rise from the snow
banks
an inhuman roar of motion
outcry of opprobrium from
the gathered masses
our music rages downward
our words later echo 
from the scrubbed cliff
face
speech fades with the dust
settling, earth coming to rest
again
we lie dying beneath the rubble
humming softly
no one to rescue us
poems fail in our mouths
dry and brittle on the tongue





Surviving
  –the self replaces the soul as the fist of survival
                                                                     –Fanny Howe (2008)

if you will attack with fists
this thing of survival
this daily fight of the self
and them
and it
those ancient bristlecone
pines, a lake lost 15,000 years
ago, the shoreline benches
still visible, gravel bars
baking in the sun--

if you will survive
this new aridity without
dessication, better the self
your fist to smash through
walls than a soul like a ghost
wafting by, insubstantial
element like fog at noon
swirling on a cold north bay
surrounded by redwoods

a soul unattached cannot
wage war, cannot battle ice
or fires, not like the bones
grown hard, fingers clenched
in defiance and you standing
on the beach or Wheeler Peak
with the pines gnarled by age
survivors who can finally
let go with one living branch
and apparitions in the rocks
whispering about thousands
of years of snow to reach
this point, your self a mere
footnote to their victory