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Words for the Dead

Mouse my cat killed grey scrap in a dustpan carried to the trash

To your soul I say:

With none to hide from run now, dance within the walls of the great house

And to your body:

Inside the body of the great earth in unbounded being be still



McCoy Creek: Cattle

Long after sunset the afterlight glows warm along the rimrock.
A wind down off the mountain blows soft, a little chill.
I’ve come to love the quiet sound cattle make cropping short grass.
Day and night are much the same to them in the pastures of summer,
cows and calves, they crop and pull with that steady, comfortable sound as the light in the rimrock and the sky dims away slowly. Now no wind.
I don’t know if cattle see the stars,
but all night long they graze and walk and stand in the calm light that has no shadows.



McCoy Creek: Wind


The wind beats on the drums of my ears and overturns the chairs,
blowing out of all the years we’ve come here, been here.

The bird that says tzeep says tzeep.
Dry pods on the old honeylocust rattle.
Barbed wire draws straggling lines between us and distant cattle.
Rocking like little white sailboats two hens cross the footbridge.

Behind me and before me the basalt ridges are silent as the air is silent when the wind for a moment ceases.




SIX QUATRAINS

Autumn

gold of amber red of ember brown of umber all September

McCoy Creek

Over the bright shallows now no flights of swallows.
Leaves of the sheltering willow dangle thin and yellow.

October

At four in the morning the west wind moved in the leaves of the beech tree with a long rush and patter of water,
first wave of the dark tide coming in.

Solstice

On the longest night of all the year in the forests up the hill,
the little owl spoke soft and clear to bid the night be longer still.


The Winds of May

are soft and restless in their leafy garments that rustle and sway making every moment movement


Hail

The dogwood cowered under the thunder and the lilacs burned like light itself against the storm-black sky until the hail whitened the grass with petals.




Come to Dust

Spirit, rehearse the journeys of the body that are to come, the motions of the matter that held you.

Rise up in the smoke of palo santo.
Fall to the earth in the falling rain.
Sink in, sink down to the farthest roots.
Mount slowly in the rising sap to the branches, the crown, the leaf-tips.
Come down to earth as leaves in autumn to lie in the patient rot of winter.
Rise again in spring’s green fountains.
Drift in sunlight with the sacred pollen to fall in blessing.
All earth’s dust has been life, held soul, is holy.




Lullaby

where’s my little fleeting cat a year a year an hour a day where’s my little girl at fleeting away sleeping away found the way clear away nowhere far nowhere near a day a day an hour a year



To the Rain

Mother rain, manifold, measureless,
falling on fallow, on field and forest,
on house-roof, low hovel, high tower,
downwelling waters all-washing, wider than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster than countrysides, calming, recalling:
return to us, teaching our troubled souls in your ceaseless descent to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root,
to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea.



The Fine Arts

Judging beauty, which is keenest,
Eye or heart or mind or penis?
Lust is blindest, feeling kindest,
Sight is strongest, thought goes wrongest.



An Autumn Reading for Andrea

The poet read in the Scholar’s Room in the Chinese garden, her words half heard in rush and crash of rain on formal ponds and pavements,
like verses cut in an old stone blurred by moss and lichen.
Under the downpour purple chrysanthemums nodded in silence.



A Cento of Scientists

(Alternating quotations from Charles Darwin, Galileo Galilei, and Giordano Bruno)

There is grandeur
The sun with all the circling planets it sustains
God is glorified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest in this view of life the sun with all the circling planets yet glorified not in one but in countless suns from so simple a beginning endless forms the sun with all the planets it sustains yet can ripen a bunch of grapes not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful the sun can ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do not in a single world but in a thousand thousand, an infinity of worlds endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved as if it had nothing else in the universe to do
All things are in the universe, and the universe is in all things,
we in it and it in us
There is grandeur in this view of life


How it Seems to Me

In the vast abyss before time, self is not, and soul commingles with mist, and rock, and light. In time,
soul brings the misty self to be.
Then slow time hardens self to stone while ever lightening the soul,
till soul can loose its hold of self and both are free and can return to vastness and dissolve in light,
the long light after time.