| Prose
Lookout's Journal
A. Crater Mountain
22 June 52 Marblemount Ranger Station
Skagit District, Mt. Baker National Forest
Hitchhiked here, long valley of the Skagit. Old cars parked in the weeds,
little houses in fields of bracken. A few cows, in stumpland.
Ate at the "parkway café" real lemon in the pie
"—why don't you get a jukebox in here"
"—the man said we weren't important enough"
* * * 28 June Blackie Burns: "28 years ago you could find a good place to fish.
GREEDY & SELFISH NO RESPECT FOR THE
LAND tin cans, beer bottles, dirty dishes
a shit within a foot of the bed
one sonuvabitch out of fifty
fishguts in the creek
the door left open for the bear.
If you're takin forestry fellas keep away
from the recreation side of it:
first couple months you see the women you say
'there's a cute little number'
the next three months it's only another woman
after that you see one coming out of the can
& wonder if she's just shit on the floor
ought to use pit toilets"
* * *
Granite creek Guard station 9 July
the boulder in the creek never moves
the water is always falling
together!
A ramshackle little cabin built by Frank Beebe the miner.
Two days walk to here from roadhead.
arts of the Japanese: moon-watching
insect-hearing Reading the sutra of Hui Nêng.
one does not need universities and libraries
one need be alive to what is about
saying "I don't care"
* * *
11 July
cut fresh rhubarb by the bank
the creek is going down
last night caught a trout
today climbed to the summit of Crater Mountain and back
high and barren: flowers I don't recognize
ptarmigan and chicks, feigning the broken wing.
Baxter: "Men are funny, once I loved a girl
so bad it hurt, but I drove her away. She was
throwing herself at me—and four months later she
married another fellow."
A doe in the trail, unafraid.
A strange man walking south
A boy from Marblemount with buckteeth, learning machine shop.
* * *
Crater Mountain Elevation: 8049 feet 23 July
Really wretched weather for three days now—wind, hail, sleet, snow; the
FM transmitter is broken / rather the receiver is / what can be done?
Even here, cold foggy rocky place, there's life—4 ptarmigan by the
A-frame, cony by the trail to the snowbank.
hit my head on the lamp,
the shutters fall, the radio quits,
the kerosene stove won't stop, the wood stove
won't start, my fingers are too numb to write.
& this is mid-July. At least I have energy enough to read science-fiction.
One has to go to bed fully clothed.
* * *
The stove burning wet wood—windows misted over giving the blank
white light of shoji. Outside wind blows, no visibility. I'm filthy with
no prospect of cleaning up. (Must learn yoga-system of Patanjali—)
* * *
Crater Shan 28 July
Down for a new radio, to Ross Lake, and back up. Three days walking.
Strange how unmoved this place leaves one; neither articulate nor
worshipful; rather the pressing need to look within and adjust the mechanism
of perception.
A dead sharp-shinned hawk, blown by the wind against the lookout.
Fierce compact little bird with a square head.
—If one wished to write poetry of nature, where an audience?
Must come from the very conflict of an attempt to articulate the vision
poetry & nature in our time.
(reject the human; but the tension of
human events, brutal and tragic, against
a nonhuman background? like Jeffers?)
* * *
Pair of eagles soaring over Devil's Creek canyon
* * *
31 July
This morning:
floating face down in the water bucket
a drowned mouse.
"Were it not for Kuan Chung, we should be wearing our hair unbound and our
clothes buttoning on the left side"
A man should stir himself with poetry
Stand firm in ritual
Complete himself in music
Lun Yü
* * *
Comparing the panoramic Lookout View photo dated 8 August 1935:
with the present view. Same snowpatches; same shapes. Year after year;
snow piling up and melting.
"By God" quod he, "for pleynly, at a word
Thy drasty ryming is not worth a tord."
* * *
Crater Shan 3 August
How pleasant to squat in the sun
Jockstrap & zoris
form—leaving things out at the right spot
ellipse, is emptiness
these ice-scoured valleys
swarming with plants
"I am the Queen Bee!
Follow Me!"
* * *
Or having a wife and baby,
living close to the ocean, with skills for
gathering food.
QUEBEC DELTA 04 BLACK
Higgins to Pugh (over)
"the wind comes out of the east
or northeast,
the chimney smokes all over the room.
the wind comes out of the west;
the fire burns clean."
Higgins L.O. reads the news:
"flying saucer with a revolving black band
drouth in the south.
Are other worlds watching us?"
The rock alive, not barren.
flowers lichen pinus albicaulis chipmunks
mice even grass.
—first I turn on the radio
—then make tea & eat breakfast
—study Chinese until eleven
—make lunch, go chop snow to melt for water,
read Chaucer in the early afternoon.
"Is this real
Is this real
This life I am living?"
—Tlingit or Haida song
* * *
"Hidden Lake to Sourdough"
—"This is Sourdough"
—"Whatcha doing over there?"
—"Readin some old magazines
they had over here."
* * *
6 August
Clouds above and below, but I can see Kulshan, Mt. Terror, Shuksan;
they blow over the ridge between here and Three-Fingered Jack, fill up
the valleys. The Buckner Boston Peak ridge is clear.
What happens all winter; the wind driving snow; clouds—wind, and
mountains—repeating
this is what always happens here, and the photograph of a young female torso hung in the lookout window,
in the foreground. Natural against natural, beauty.
two butterflies
a chilly clump of mountain
flowers.
zazen non-life. An art: mountain-watching.
leaning in the doorway whistling
a chipmunk popped out
listening
* * *
9 August
Sourdough: Jack, do you know if a fly is an electrical conductor? (over)
Desolation: A fly? Are you still trying to electrocute flies? (over)
Sourdough: Yeah I can make em twitch a little. I got five number
six batteries on it (over)
Desolation: I don't know, Shubert, keep trying. Desolation clear.
* * *
10 August
First wrote a haiku and painted a haiga for it; then repaired the Om
Mani Padme Hum prayer flag, then constructed a stone platform, then
shaved down a shake and painted a zenga on it, then studied the lesson.
a butterfly
scared up from its flower
caught by the wind and swept over the cliffs
SCREE
Vaux Swifts: in great numbers, flying before the storm, arcing so
close that the sharp wing-whistle is heard.
"The sravaka
disciplined in Tao, enlightened, but on the wrong path."
summer,
on the west slopes creek beds are brushy
north-faces of ridges, steep and
covered late with snow slides and old burns on dry hills.
(In San Francisco: I live on the Montgomery Street drainage—at the top
of a long scree slope just below a cliff.)
* * *
sitting in the sun in the doorway
picking my teeth with a broomstraw
listening to the buzz of the flies.
(Continues...) | 
