summer Yuba

Flukes and fins the river gives

For sliding down channels of emerald light

granite contours blue basin to blue basin

In a stream of bubbles,

Whiskered otters leaping for air

Five PM on Mill St

Five PM on Mill Street

Sun bronze on brick sidings

The day winding down

A riot of blackbirds

Descends squawking to the street

Little green eyes strutting 

Wink at you

For all things I wish wildness

 For all things I wish wildness

Open   free running   larks

In clear forests, seas, skies and rivers;

Belly-thrilled with blue vastness,

An end to grates, latches, clips and tethers

For all the unbound delight 

                         of wind in feathers—

Long Street

Sitting on a curb

Where the lamp's burnt out

Musing on summer stars

Bones made of sand….

Burdick Excavation

Mangled mud-splashed trucks

'Burdick Excavation' on the doors  

In a crusted logo of sun and trees

Yuba Camp

Bamboo flute playing off rock cliffs 

Camped in the river canyon

I give thanks for this soft dream of life

time warp

Crash of fluorescence

Lean back in the chair

Open wide

On the monitor a video plays

“Space Race Story”

X-rays clipped on the wall—

What's a scrub & star aborigine like me

Doing down this far-flung century?

the original Q

But let's get back to the original question: 

what makes a fish happy?

-Chuang-tzu

windsocks

Give me the exuberance 
Of Spring windsocks

Streaming reds and greens and yellows 
In Michigan sunlight

[shimmering?] 

Where Night Is

‘Pure Idiot Glee’ to find oneself a child where night is, engulfed, enmooned and sunk where this ice-in-the-grass wide Orion darkness is cast, cold chimneystones and whole histories of chimneystone dim, out of mind, where unseen geese sleep in sheds, streets inexplicably silent long hours – whole nights—emptiness where ancient rays of stars find their earthen shore, beginningless / endless realm of night who sunstruck day is brief winter interlude, where now the shining insects that danced a million tireless spawnings on the drowsy June air

the power fails

The power fails, 

houses go suddenly dark, 

limitless night in every direction 

‘where once a town was’—

only a moon haze 

above frosted shingles

One Morning

For a brief instant I saw it-that we are somehow alive in this utterly inexplicable world, world of stones in valley creeks, world of tree leaves by the thousand shimmering with a sudden breeze in them, world of spring clouds spreading against a blue mountain sky, and vanishing. I felt for a moment the incredible wonder of it all, the wonder of eyes & ears and mind to drink it in and delight in it, the wonder whose deeper emotion is a kind of ecstasy—the joy to be alive and extant as mysteriously as the rest. Somehow this is the poet’s estate– to arrive at some understanding of the actual significance of things, to be guided by this recurrent sense of the latent joy of things. In his hour of beatitude the man comes aware of an order of reality so rarely expressed by the prosaic arrangements of this money-minded world, a reality whose hieroglyph is the opening of blue-vein’d morningglories with dawn in them, or the first flakes of snow in a silent woodside. He knows, and get swallowed in it too easily, that the human world is a montage of pretexts and presumptions at some psychic remove from this primordial state he glimpses ‘out this side of his eye.’

School Street

A day of deep grayness and stillness in the leafless trees and a sky pouring out of itself a dull somber light, casting the entire hushed landscape of bark and cattails and scrap lumber into Trappist photographs.

A very interior kind of day, all the earth and sky drawn into a deepening meditation as if to say, “this, this, of 1000 years.”

Crossing Brooklyn Bridge

Across the Brooklyn Bridge

Walking the crest this rich warm Manhattan midnight, 

the world's wavering mirage is seen—

Plates of moonlight froth on the East River below,

Greengold lights of the intrepid steel Gotham awaiting,

  rat tat tat

the pneumatic hammers of the red vest union Jack’s

Astride the moving link

Of headlights on the drone roadway beneath—

All of the temporal plane with its movable Orange traffic cones

Hazard flash of public work trucks

Lined on the rail

How far the Verrazano cable glints on the Jersey shore,

Roar of motorcycle unseen,

Flip-flop chip clop

padding the big city bridge

Autumn on Pasquale

The autumn wind has given the great volume of fat yellow madrone leaves one destiny.

With great insouciance they brightly careen and tumble down Pasquale Road

until the gust subsides and they fall limp & passive across the shaded pavement.

Then a crosswind arrives & it's up and away to new destinations....

Stovewood Scavenging

9.16

The Madrone groves at the far end of the Pasqule road, have become a refuge for me from the rancor and tumult of fan agitated overwrought world… here I am resolved into a sheltering canopy of green madrone leaves where scattered ribbons of sunlight fall, where a slight wind only deepens the stillness. My errand here is wholly transparent: one man, one truck, one pair of gloves tugging at the discarded red branches, retrieving them out of thickets of deerbrush and kitkitdizze– What the county crews left from road clearing. Scraps I come now to fetch for my winter's hearth. But just as much, and even more perhaps, I come to immerse myself in the deep serenity of these words, thankful such elemental labor still avails itself in this mechanized world.

The Hopkins Job

This is what fate has doled out for me: 

Snaking under Hopkins’ house amid batts of falling R-19 in the dog days of August

To braze the three-quarter-inch copper hot water tank

Pressure Relief tubing elbow

-as per county regulations- 
in order to discharge under the deck,

Keeping a wary eye on the snarling toothsome black lab

drooling at the far end of the crawlspace

Who has it in for me

Summer on Alta street

Lucia tells us eating pasta she heard the big jet roar last Sunday low over Grass Valley

“some people thought it was the end of the world”

Thea says pass the peas

Jason pulls the rim springs assembling the backyard trampoline

Slips out of his hand

Voooosh! strikes Megan across the neck

She breaks into tears

The neighbor lady’s drunk wearing a loose Budweiser tank top

Sunburned after a day on Englebright

“in the 50s,” says Avila, 

 “the neighbors used to have moving dinners course by course at     

 each house, then they end up here in the garage to dance”

Bats careen over the ping-pong table

Sun streams golden on burnished floors

At 7 PM in late July

Dead skunk on Ridge Road driving home

 in the late wide warm summer darkness 

my skull

My curved hollow skull is a conch shell

I listen for crows or dolphins

There seem to be oceans 

In every direction

dream

The sea is calm,

No wind.

From dream I wake at dawn,
Undulating in slow swells,

In a place of pink and amber highlights.

I cling to something

Knees in limp kelp,

Alone

Save for three white terns

Asleep on the water.

'beauty'

yes the fine symmetry of grassheads 

pendant with raindrops shimmering in a light breeze; 

but what in the cerebellum pronounces the word ‘beauty’?

FOUR PM

I pull my Adirondack chair at 4 PM p.m. onto the deck and wait.

Clear sky, a few ragtag clouds to west, and wait. Minutes tick by, this patience delectable, knowing they're on their way. Take a deep breath, a quiet delight  rising in the knees, and wait. Suddenly a distant squawk ripples the silver silence –out of the pine tops, across the Ridge, they arrive. In a loose grouping dozens of black crows heading east, now a conversation of crows fills the sky. An expectation of bliss on a winter afternoon, not disappointed.

when the rain has stopped

when the rain has stopped

and the wet woods drip

from every branch 

& pine needle

a collage of prisms

greets the marveling eye

red     &green    &blue    

Humboldt County

HUMBOLDT COUNTY 

Slight rain

  falls cold

    across the windshield

As we bounce

  over the broken asphalt

    west to Petrolia

A stiff wind

  blowing the golden grasses

    making our way

To Cape Mendocino--

Forgetting for a sublime moment

  the troubles of this world

    where the expanse

of sky sea & land

Conspire

  to provoke bliss

    in our throats

test your luck

Stealing in boxers out to the truck

No Get Caught turns into a game

Get caught turns into smiling shame

A simple way to test your luck

bad nightmare

driving in the snow somewhere, somebody in the front driving, Tril & Mark I think, we'd gone somewhere to check things out, no room in cab so I had to hunker down & sprawl across the rear with things

later in a house somewhere waiting for Bernie

trying to iron out the loan of 50K with Tril & others, a latino who was getting frustrated with the terms

Then Bernie drives up in a large military  vehicle or LARGE pickup, we offered to hose it down, so opened the door and hosed down the cab, the inside of the cab, Bernie just got a big smile on his face like "whatever"

then a bad scene of the short latino guy in an undershirt & funky fedora starts talking gruff to me

whatcha gonna do about it" I asked him

kick your ass" he says

Oh yeah? I strutted over to where he was and said "you think so?"

we square off, but when the punching starts I'm hitting an older overweight woman but the punches are doing no good

somebody from the crowd Tril? says "Craig go easy on her"

wake up