industry

Tom Q mocks the Samoan painter
   who brushed lattice
      according to his own sweet time,
Says- if he were foreman-
   "it would drive me crazy."
I know what he means,
I too have the nail-pounding devil in me,
I push myself to be productive.
   I smiled inwardly,
I envied that insouciant islander
His sweet indolence

rowdy ravens

A group of rowdy ravens
    makes a ruckus in the locust trees
        up at the County Airpark.
    There are the beginnings of rain
    On Drake Hill
    As I deliver new phonebooks.
    Funny that I would remember
    What Jon Pearl once told me:
       “It’d be great
          to be a big black bird
             carousing in the sky--
    But then you’d have to eat bugs!”

left out

japanese lanterns,
   big party next door-
      not invited!

a little slice of Humboldt heaven

A little slice of Humboldt heaven
    Where I took refuge from sudden showers,
    Pushing my borrowed blue bicycle
    Into the dark high-raftered dairy barn.
    A soft sheen of rain
    Played on the tin roof
    As I stroked the moon-eyed pokeys
    In the close pens-
    Then the sun broke through
    And all the wet pebbles shone
    Back to the road
    Glistening like the first day of the world,
    And I was on my way.

Usal Rd

USAL Rd

Like Roethke’s “Interior”
One presses on
Where the pavement ends,
All the Caution signs
   riddled with bullets
But you follow the curving gravel
Through dark tunnels of oak,
Across beat creosote bridges
   where no water runs,
Further   &   Farther
Into switchback mountains
Winding out in low gears
To the inevitable fork
   and of course,
All the arrows missing.
Guess south on Mendocino County Rd #431,
Miles of harrowing timber access road,
You’ve no idea where you’re going
Sliding in dust to the axles
   potholes & lurch & cuss
Over down madrone branches,
The rusted Ford pickup
   rolled in the ditch---
Then magically!    the trees give way
Stark bright golden star
   Shining over white Pacific fogbank
Far as the eye can see.

poet

It turns out I’m chowderhead himself
    I’m the one without a clue
All the world’s smarts lost on me
    Wandering the windy slough

-Humboldt Co.

dairy country

Seawinds carry mist in a line
   off irrigation sprinkler heads
      dairy pastures down Substation Rd

Bullet holes in big yellow Cattle Xing sign
   sky shimmering in the troughs
      rock music blares from milking barns

-Fortuna, CA

handyman hell

Rather than drive back home
And get the extension ladder I forgot
I take wild chances
Balancing on one foot
Atop the neighbor's stepladder
To pull the large mat of pine-needles
Off her tin roof
In woolcap & frayed jacket
Like some college kid errand-
Wondering, "what the hell am I doing here?"


 (age sixty-one)

tramping

    It couldn’t be planned,  it had to rise up out of the expanding moment, Moment, it was the very current of life (in its most exquisite banality) as deepest approving gesture, it couldn’t be scheduled like any bus trip it spoke rather out of the very weft of things, time, Time, this, This, you’d been looking elsewhere, crossing fingers, ‘spousing mantras, like grace it burst forth the inner significance unbeknownst & unheralded, one night, Night, in the act of surrender all’s won

for Allen Ginsberg

    Some for whom the green/gold vibration of existence slipped through the weft of convention to hum softly in the belly,
    Some for whom the myriad pretexts simply don’t wash, remaining pretexts,
    Some for whom the inner gnosis of the larger world Got Through, messaging Ex-stasis,
    Some for whom the low hum of existing is worth more than a pile of appliances,
    Some for whom the low hum is the wavelength of God, that is, sudden belly kinship to stars...
    Some for whom that visceral resonance connected them to ‘the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night,’ who received the subtile energies of the Cosmos oblique to the neat algorithms of utility,
    Some for whom relations to all things remain open-ended and thus glimmer with Possibility, all predicates droppt, making them secretly and not-so secretly giddy....

march eighteenth- grass valley

the soft gentle quiet snow
has brought the gritty city
to its knees

that helling place

Looking up from their books
   every head in the library
      when it thundered

new/ancient snow

    From Palmer Road suddenly we walked out onto Bloomfield, in a flurry of cold ‘popcorn’ snow swishing off the black umbrella, Bloomfield become a pure new ribbon of white ice without a single track so thickly did the new snow fall & fall & fall, erasing all differentiation, and in that late frosted moment I found myself walking every lonely backroad in the world, for a thousand miles this same endless avenue stretched to Wyoming & counties you never heard of, past empty pastures & granite deadfalls, little-used roads where snow fell huge & silent into pine barrens & fishbone cottonwoods, not a sign of anyone just plywood tilting bus-sheds covered with wet sphagnum, needles, & ancient perpetual froze-fingered snow

Lazy Dog 2

Never forget how lucky you are
   To find rubber dinosaurs
      Left in the bathtub

Terra Flora

Lift the latch
  to the inner
    gardens
      where
        peeper frogs
          blink with dew

Mt Lincoln

Riding the four-wide chair alone
To top of Mt Lincoln
Clapping my rented skis together
I’m overcome by purple alpine aether
Holy enchantment mountain light
On snow-feather rock cornices,
I was so literally high
At the twelve-thousand feet offload
I slid to a stop
Breathless
On the matted ice
In every direction snowy Sierra peaks
Appeared between great white pure clouds
Turning,
Some had dark rain
Some had lightning

Drive-In

Night freeway driving-
   Meryl Streep's face huge
      On the Drive-In screen

-Oakland

stung!

Beware!  when you allege
   "Dead is the wasp"
       On the windowledge

early Spring, north valley

To Marysville eight AM
rain clearing in the valley
mist rising everywhere
wet    wet    wet
the good earth reborn
long
  bright
    puddles
in mud tractor rows
ditch grass frizzed beaded & bent,
over distant fields
white waterbirds
flutter     light    &settle-

(2002)

charmed objects

Charmed objects
You treasure for many a year--
Like the Italian 20-lira coin
I found on rainy backstreets
In Hundred Mile, Canada one summer
Carried such a long time in my wallet
Until I showed it one night to Jan
At the Forbestown Bar
Who said she’d trade me
A jukebox dance for it--
Gone.


(1999)