Where is the promised cure? What are its forms Applications, usefulness, implications Tea, salve, tincture, poultice That charm you wear around your neck Under your shirt, bury it at the crossroads Wormwood in bitter old age Alamo for the fever, the boil that rises in the night Alegria, blood of the deer, loosen the child’s tongue, Quiet the aging heart, Anil del muerto since The modern age you find indigestible And chair-bound Sunflower of the dead man may help Borage for courage, cachana Charm away mal del ojo And what is our post-post-modern Predicament save lack of courage And the evil eye? So many for stomach ache – chamisa, chimaja Hinojo, poleo – cota to soothe you Artemisia to sweat you – a small sip at a time. But what of the plague that stalks us, masks us, Isolates – what cure for the viral hate and disaffection What remedio for the cancer inexorable in our breasts? Inmortal and Osha and quiet prayer, and maybe The rattlesnakes and the witches (unmasked without Doubt) will keep their distance too.
Holy Places
Old church in ruins Ancient walls building up anew Holy river racing below Yellow warbler In silverlace vine from China Elk tracks in the sandy bank Take the shoes from off your feet Holy hills ring the sky Bowl open to the sky Habitation of lizards Sanctuary of small birds The white earth and the red In harmony Dusty tread for our recreation We who do not own this But belong to it, like the old ones Said. Our querencia finds us watching The rose-fingered dawn Through alien trees While the doves come for water
The Wild
Passing stone-eyed in the wild ignorance Frosted grey against hoar-frost white Hooved plunderers, ruin of gardens Destroyers of the flowers I plant for my love Heedless in their browsing as the glass-eyed Teenagers at the corner market, valuing Nothing except their own wild hunger, their Self-contained oneness with the wide expanse Of sagebrush, remorseless in their foraging Experimental ravagers, they pass in silent Ghostly troop, keepers of the world that was, World that is coming, Enforcers of entropy.
A Modern Venery
A devastation of diseases A prolongation of plague A congregation of coronaviruses A coven of cancers A disassembly of side effects A hopefulness of treatments A supposition of herbs A profitability of patients.
Vistas
A few more days in this borrowed house Within the sound of church bells A few more days in this cradle of time Beside the hopeful abused river Brief time of accounting Before the new place is ours That last place we dream of, dark ceilings Fire undying on the hearth, walls filled With scenes of lost mountains Disappeared querencias beside haunted rivers Memories of owls sounding from the fir trees Gardens of remembrance, the corn that reached the sky But never yielded abundance Great vista of sky, chasm of light Mountains of rock and cloud Snow covered peaks across the divide Chasms of light, canyons of shadow Above dark trees Distant views across ancient pueblos Now covered with pinon and sunflowers Arroyos filled with broken pots Churches full of old bones A new river, new city, new trees Mountains of light unscalable Music never ending , houses unalienable Unalterable and unaging
Lost Mountains
This picture of icy mountains Couloirs full of broken blocks Aretes knife-edged at their sides The deceptively easy-looking Snowfields at the base, until You come to sheer rock and Bergschrund Inaccessible ledges run west The only way to the top that Misses the elephant’s trunk Bulging from the eastern summit This painting of icy mountains That I will never behold under the sky Is as immediate to my soul as hospital Gown, radioactive IV Frosty white tunnel to come.
Quarantine Chorus
Surprised by flowers of a full spring day Scablands grey, tall clouds passing through Blue skies in procession, trailing dark Blowing curtains, rays of sunlight Fritillaria forgotten from last year’s seed catalog Nod checkered lilies over maple leaves Amidst wind-flowers daffodils crocus. But below Where blue-eyed grass towers Over microscopic lomatium unseen Cream golden nemophila nestles Amidst basalt slag, cryptobiotic forests, phlox. Shouts of play all stilled from the schoolyard This morning recess, but birdsong is loud Wind stirs spring branches while the neighbors Work on the annual float for the parade That will never come this year Fear on the mild breeze Contagion in every face Frustration leads the desperate astray From love during pestilence, friendship In the dark wood, phone calls like its 1975. Kyrie eleison ring the wind chimes White-crowned sparrows at my feet. Cacophonous Chinese plastic bagpipes Surprisingly sweet Romanian fiddle Pre-electric wind-up phonograph Silver flute carrying old names Box filled with wax symphonies Golden boy’s mellow clarinet Digital box remembering old songs How to live during the plague: Stay in your house (for how long?) Until the cities be desolate, without Inhabitant. . . (Not so long, we pray) Until watching The Office again seems More unbearable than the ventilator? Until the time and times and a time Have passed us by, the remnant? The children kept from the sky The grandmother kept from her busy acquisition Grandfather fuming in frustrated illusion This wasn’t the deal – there were Unlimited Ford Mustangs, manufactured houses, Hot Pockets, ammunition stores (keeping the neighbors At bay amidst all the abundance?) Scramble for toilet paper, limit Consumption, milk down the drain, harvest Rots in fields. The prison cell appears in essence – no distraction from the digital bars, no limit to boredom Hold on until the cough comes (maybe you already had it) Steer clear quack remedies pushed from high places, wear your mask though the mask has slipped, lament the poor billionaire stuck on his yacht, realize nurses as followers of high calling, but with no protection, no respect, no reprieve from infection, keep your chin up, your hair down, don’t forget to bathe, eat but not too much, lay off the booze, move in a haze, enjoy the sunshine, free time, paint pictures, sing a song, write a poem, remember days gone by, remember there are days to come, new countryside at the end of the tunnel, structures of dual power, possibility of fresh air, put away your skull mask (put one on Posada!) wear a human face, keep a human heart, free the chained bird that flutters at your soul center, ponder querencia, trace out faded figures, restore garbled words, Stack up stones of love.
Three Seasons
Yesterday a three season day Rain, sun and wind, snow still lingering In the morning still with frost. Birds Gather seeds on this second day of our Feeder watch. One more day of radiation and attempted Poison before that other poison called waiting. The insurance company will protest that I am too far Gone. Not worth the expense and bother. The doctor puts it in more soothing terms. My mind rebels still at the notion that there Is no cure, only prolonging of life – mere semantics. There truly is no cure for the thing that chases us From birth down halls and forests of life. There is Only this last frost-rimed morning of winter Filled with diamond-dust snow and the Singing of the miraculous little birds.
Cancer Songs
I. Take no thought for tomorrow - No more radical words for our progress-obsessed system Don't think about tomorrow Precludes stock options, house payments, cruise vacations Super Bowl fantasies - in short the whole tackle and trim of pre-apocalyptic consumerist normalcy. Take care of today is corollary Perfectly suited to quarantine and prayer Be here now we are instructed over and over down through millenia, live for the day, Tomorrow never comes. And so I want to ask, I want to ask How long? How long until that Dawn with no tomorrow Long night of no sunrise Short coursing of the sun At the end of the race? When the blue birds come back forever When the snow is finally gone The rain blowing in from the south When we all sit at the table No longer contending over shadows, Disputing the flickering histories of our cavern wall. But that is not tomorrow Instead, a sort of no-tomorrow. Not worrisome, an easy burden, Consummation waited for since the beginning beginning of whatever this is whatever will be, world without end healing waters from the great river, the healing trees, music unending And so without a thought for the mundane tomorrow Daily chores, bills, work, status-seeking, gossip, unperformed house repairs and unwritten poems I ask again How long? II. And so we buried Violet, honorary duchess Our angora rabbit, under shroud and stone Covered with tulips and strawflowers Her foot of ground, said a prayer for her sweet spirit As we stood and spent a few tears. And what was that solemn ceremony? Where do the spirits of animals go, and why are we so Sure their fate is so different than ours? Buried in her garden among sage and calendula Where she made her lippety rounds weighed down with basalt stone and blossoms. Or Ajax, leg-destroying hero dog for whom I spent Hard labor building his cairn of milky quartz stone Among the farewell-to-spring and poppies of a fire-singed green California hillside? No such hero’s grave will I get in this refined age, No shrine of river rock hauled to hilltop, No shroud of old bedsheet, or should I just vanish like an old cat. We all go our way, in our time, God send angels To guide us, but no word has come back from that Far shore, except from He who told us he conquered Death, and promised resurrection, but He left again After a few days and hasn’t been seen since, and seldom Heard from. III. Yesterday, May Day, wave the red flag, dance around the May pole, Light the two fires to drive the cattle between, but we all huddle Separated in our houses across nations and continents, while the Charlatans still preach that there are more important things than Being alive – presumably pork chops airline revenue hotel vacancy rates Fat women in Michigan getting hair colored and nails painted red white blue To which I can only say that there are more important things than dying - Though it comes for us all, no privilege, but rather a reckoning – Bird song, love, breathing the mountains again, swimming in the emerald sea, A boy playing clarinet, gardens to come, smell of roasting chiles, winter’s chill. Why climb this mountain holding death in our heart, why hazard the climb, And then turn back from the summit – life is the basic premise Death the dollar flash and trim. Court life even as it flees. Hold in your heart hope of resurrection, cherish that consummation of life forever, but know that we humans cling to this vail of shadow as our natural habitat, shaped for its beauties and its terrors. IV. Scenes from a childhood come unbidden to mind Disjointed, carrying little apparent weight or meaning – A Christmas gathering at the Perkins (whoever they might Have been or still be) where I had real mincemeat pie, Tiny concrete block church where an honest to God old Irishman Sang me a song about his name and about crocodiles on the Nile, Tremendous water-oak in front of a house, long gone, where I found strange insects, sun coming up over far hills, spring days, exulting survival of night. Now for me days of doctor consultation Analyzing the recent scans, interpreting the electron clusters Captured on screen, looking for other invaders, metastases (may no new thing arise) taste of fear coming again with the Five o’clock blues and with the morning cough – metallic and bitter as you may guess.
Sulaire
Sulaire, at last I see you Meteor falling into this sea Of polished bronze Fiery sea still holding fisherman’s bones, concealing proscribed priests, pirate secrets I watch from the megalithic tomb At Cleggan Farm, its great wedge capstone Pointing like a ship’s prow Toward western lands Gorse glowing burning golden, Sheep content with the turf on their marshy hillside Sun sinking while you rise And plummet, rise And fall again Inishbofin’s hills like white cattle Floating hazy, heavy On the darkening horizon While you wing your way Fish-filled to your cliffy fortress. Sulaire, sea comet, I see you at last.
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