Red Berry

Red Berry

And he will protect those who love

the woods and rivers, Gods and animals,
hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick

people, musicians, playful women and hopeful

children…                    

                                    Gary Snyder

                                    from the Smokey the Bear Sutra

                                   

Today, the bear is making

quiet, she is nose low

and hoping that the lonely old

late in growing berries will come

up from under the cold

bog.  The world accepts her

mostly because they don’t

know her from any place

other than their own

arrogance.  They’ll hold

moldy bread between

their fingers – and rigid,

stick it out and into the lip

of the bear’s memory, trying

to change her mind.  They

think they’re being believed,

they think they’re being

trusted.  Sons and daughters

are given permission to touch

the sacred hara of the bear,

two inches below the chewed life

line, where it is believed

all chi resides.  They are burned

but don’t know it until later,

much, much later, when they,

reaching for their own cheek,

or their own feet, see

the scorch on each finger

print, and, leaning into the mirror,

in the dead center of their eye.

Keepers

Keepers 

six steps up

lubec, maine

My hope is that this minuscule prayer

will reach out to the god unknown I just sensed

passing in the rivulet of breeze above the mere rivulet

of water in this small arroyo.  To the skittering insect

this place is as large as the Sea of Galilee.

                                                Jim Harrison

                                                Small Gods

Before automation, before, when the fog

would come in or the heavy mist or the high

seas were sensed  and the light arrived like

a conjuring, when the keeper had to

climb the tower and light the fire that would

guide the men through the coming and going

seas, feet between each metal stair and hand-

wrought tread with its lack of backing, that went

deep into the air, that went straight up and straight

down in the brick cylinder, I imagine

looking out with his eyes, and too with his wife’s

eyes, who both stay awake, he with his lit wick,
she with her midnight bread. Both of them, fingers
sticky or slick with soot or with flour,
lubricant and a whiff of kerosene,
up the wrists with a sudden flip and push,

flip and push, like he’s drawing on a small
pipe and she’s exhaling all her weight in-
to the flattening of every pocket
and lung of air rising up, the sea or
the dough.  He’s cupping a flame to

the bowl of his pipe, she’s pushing her body
into the frame of the table he made
years ago in his off time.  It’s blond with age,
this wood’s particular gray—and days and days

they eat separately, he in cleaning the Fresnel
lens, keeping meticulous minutes with
barometers, from wind meters, she with need-
les, with modest preening, and each completes
something: he his log, she another dainty

lace doily she’ll read and then donate to
the church bazaar come summer.  It’s a quiet
life, mostly, this kind of keeping.  The beam

of it, perpetually lit, penetrates
the deepest despair, like a hand at the end

of a solid arm plunging into
the molasses black of a fogbound August
night, when the men in the haddock-full boat don’t
know where now to row, and go down after
breaking up and plunging into the Fundy
water.  And by simply knowing where, that hand,

that wrist, that elbow and right up the shoulder
knows, no groping, and grips the exact spot
on the paused throb of the shocked muscle. 

To ease it toward shore.  To coax it back through
to life.  Like the wife who touches him when

he’s done with this particular storm, touches
his temple where the grease of the wick still
smudges, and she rubs it, and he her, where flour
still, a curl of hair still, a gloss of oil.

The Art of Skipping Stones

in-side
bertha sortiss
andres institute
brookline, nh

The Art of Skipping Stones

Birds know us as “the people of the feet.”

                                                                                Jim Harrison

                                                                                Old Bird Boy

How many skips your flat stone lives through

is determined by the curve

                of the earth

                of the elbow and wrist

                of the grip of the fingers and thumb

                of the confidence of the knee

                of the sweep of your timed release

               

of any number of things though mostly

the story goes

                of the weight of the choice

                of all the other choices

                of this particular stone

                of the toe against the foam

                of the hips        

                of the pelvis

                of the winding

                of the throw and

                of the letting go

and so

the first and then the second and so on

                of honing

                of momentum 

                of throw after throw

                of those lonely days

                of the water

                of it being odd in no way you know

                of it giving felicitation 

                of it taking and letting go of the stone

                of that skip again and again and again and again (and if you're lucky) again

of that stone who pulls the surface of the water up dripping and dripping

from the twist of her appeased earth and wave and palm pounded cheek.

A Little Trick We have or Have Not Learned

dome
first church of christ scientist
boston

A Little Trick We Have or Have Not Learned

after Peonies by Jim Harrison

The time will arrive (and maybe quickly

                pass us by) when the stories

                we’ve been telling ourselves

                to keep us alive will prove

                to be some kind of lie like maybe

                we liked the first ride because

                we were told we were supposed

                to and that it wasn’t always this

                painful just the first time or maybe

                it was the exact obsessively

                opposite: everything about it was

                ecstasy and wasn’t supposed to be

                but we made it and moved in

                and became the shape of it 

                even if it maimed us we guarded it

                like a dog because we knew

                without words someone wanted to

                take it away from us without

                thinking to ask us or thinking

                they needed our permission.

How to Make a Metaphor

within
photo by
s. lee

How to Make a Metaphor

A few minutes later his fire became more spectacular still,

when Sallee, having reached the top of the ridge, looked back

and saw the foreman enter his own fire and lie down in its hot

ashes to let the main fire pass over him.

                                                                                                Norman Maclean

                                                                                                Young Men and Fire

I:

If we don’t spend some time of our day equating

which metaphor relates to us and our living

or not even a metaphor—but the shorter distance

is broader than you think—a simile

or series of similes where like becomes the difference

between a mantra and a desire.  I’ll ask: what would you

rather, if you were sound and uninterrupted,

if you were near to being on fire but didn’t know it:

I’m thinking just now of the Mann Gulch

catastrophe in 1949 and the thirteen men

who died smoke-jumping, alive only two hours

after they fell out of the sky, dying

in denial a fire could save them from the fire

they couldn’t ultimately outclimb. What

were those thirteen, eventually?  All of each

one station of the steps of God on his way

to the cross?  Were they gods, even, or dark 

angels, these each a winged phoenix? Were they like

at times a Yahway, or a Prometheus? having just being

being created or just himself creating his clay man

or men?  I’m not far enough in the story to know

how each guy died, though I know they denied

as straight up crazy their foreman-god lighting a halo

around himself (and he survived) making a fire-

break of his own bones all near to burning

fetal, head tucked up between his knees,

breathing anything but deep.  And aren’t we

all, before we are born, caught, an amniotic

pause, like genuflecting in the dark, pressed against

the placenta, and before the first contraction

announces itself, tightening and narrowing our world

where we’re quite content to stay while above us

the fire and the wind and the sky passes over and over

us because we need to believe we're a marked lintel.   

After Jim Harrison’s “Gathering April”

string of dinghies
isle of shoals

After Jim Harrison’s “Gathering April”

                                …but still we praise

god for whom or which all blessings flow:

that April exists, that a body lays itself

down on a warm cellar door and remembers, drinks

in birds and wind, whiskey,…

                                                the little dooms hiding

in the shadow of each fence post.

                                                               

Going out into the cold morning a little

hung over is like stuffing a crow

call in one ear and an unknown bird’s

in another.  Ok, I stole the crow and the unknown

and maybe the hangover but maybe you won’t

believe me about anything but the birds

or maybe you will.  I’ll say maybe

you’ll believe me when I say I need to

go out in the cold the way Harrison does

(he’s a badass dead guy I’m reading now)

and I don’t know how I ever got along

without him but I have and I will

when I close him up forever like ashes

and specifically the ashes of my friend

who is as close to Harrison as I will ever get

and he’s pretty fucking

close.  I told a living friend the other day about the pistol

my dead friend used

to take to work with him every day, covered

in the lunch box giving his meal an earned

for feeling though no I don’t want to say that

exactly just when I read about men going out loaded

with pistols and women who are not their wives

or daughters and pull the levers

together in succession or all at once that close them

away into their own world of booze and food

and screwing and I’m thinking I could have

been one of those women and loved

it if you know what I mean.  I can connect it

with going chairless into the den:

when the lion swishes his tail and quite leisurely

gets up to sniff and licks his whiskers

with his paw before opening

something (me?  his mouth?) wide enough

to close down slowly whole

on the offering like it was expected all along,

shaved clean, witness to bleak

and not so bleak things, pumping in

the esophagus like a rabbit in the body

of the snake, on its way down into

the viscous and colossal dark.  

On Finding an Old Love Letter

On Finding an Old Love Letter

The occasion came I made myself take very envelope

I’d tucked under the sturdy structure of decades I made

myself open the only one I found of yours I made myself

open it again and tell me from the distance

we stand now here one living and you dead

I didn’t just receive word that would you yes you would

wait for me while I summited the mountain you’d watch

from the bottom of the world and I’d lace the boots

you gave me and tuck those laces and lick the last of you

from my mouth with my tongue and let the wind in

and walk and walk I’d walk the whole range while you waited

and one mountain it wouldn’t be enough while you waited and

so you made me a great stick to take with me the next time

I saw you and I didn’t notice then how weak

the climb had made me and I wanted you to take me

home with you but the mountain…and because I’ve never been much

of a climber – my feet are blind – I let myself go down

like the carriage of my body was made by a cooper

the drying hoops and sinews once new once pliant

to intention I don’t tend to notice what’s cracking what’s brittle

what gulps of altitude I head rush on high and sick

to my stomach and come down hard on the rip-rap

of some last season’s avalanche, on empty bowels, on cliché after

cliché of vultures circling when all along I wanted crows

because by then by the time your letter arrived late and torn

I was on the other side of the world and you’d stopped

watching summits but the letter and I opened it again today

and I wet my lips just in case you were still inside: it

said:     The door’s open

            come in I’ll wait