Do You Think It's A Falcon?
It's certainly Frightful scouting the wood
For a child that has taken refuge in the mountain.
Looking this day keenly for prey to sustain them
Through the winter, a hunter for a child
That lives on paper and rises in the mind
As a place to go from the dark days of youth.
Mountain to climb up into when the crash of real
Sends you looking for the cupboard under the stairs
Or attic burrow to lose this moment
Digging and hollowing a tree, old oak as new home
Escaping far away from the cacophony of one life.
Into the dense woods of another, more home this
With risks you can act on to solve and climb up.
In those mountain Frightful attends you well
The task of scouting for who is there, hers,
Looking across the pages for something
That the forest will reveal to you both today.
Viewing My Mount Fuji
Here on another shore
a world away
I see the majesty of the mountain
Heard it rise up silently
light revealing
Each breath captured in silent awe filled respect
Boy Wild
Boy in the wildness growing up
Boy caught in his time
Of then and now and to "be"
Boy wild wondering
Of power and punch
Of the things to smash
Seeing the tiny speck of beauty
Embarrassed flower
Risking failing manhood
Boy in the wilds
Trailing and twisting
Lost then running out ahead
Boy in the paths on trails
Falling over rocks
Boy in the wilds
Boy trailing and leading
Holding, helping, defining
Kicking, taunting aggravating.
Boy corrected
Pushing and laughing
Drum solo piercing the pine floor.
Boy in the wood.
Growing up and out
Choked in this woods, punctuated boy.
Secret Shared
Ah, we look at that one with especial humor
"She's trying to stop us here in time
With that new camera set on ISO,
Special sensitivity now to her plight of having to stay
Behind as we plan our escape to realize dreams
Beyond these walls of trees we are walking today
As favor to her hope to hold us and hug us to her
Earthen bosom. Can you say that in a poem?
Or is it really boobs? Who says that? Your mom's boobs?
Earth mother there with her sheep lined moccasins
And the hat she knitted, I wore one as a peace offering.
Quick capture me now wearing the days of your life,
As I'm going forward Momma out of this frame into mine."
"Smile say "Spaghetti' girls" to peels of giggles.
Yesterday
I had a cactus garden in the window of our bathroom
It grew amazing cacti, blooming every spring from the plastic cups
I got them at the Murphy Mart on the way walking home
From junior and then high school downtown
After a bowl of chili in the Communtzis
It was a pretty long haul home, all uphill, four miles
I got nailed pretty good by thorns over the years.
It was a funny place to put the cactus
Up on a small marble little ledge up over you, as you sat
On the potty, kind of threatening to fall, or falling
Needles bombing down, precarious.
Hit me in the head a bunch of times, let me tell you.
But in the spring they blossomed.
The windowsill looked like another place.
Dad called it a first class pain but he'd see the blossoms first and tell me
"Spring's coming your cactus are budding out."
So when I come upon cactus now
Anywhere in a garden, walking on a pathway
Growing up in the sun far from that bathroom
I still go there. It's a trail of memory.
I grew african violets in that window too.
Dad said it was the morning sun.
For me to grow anything I need a bit of
Morning sun and a good window.
And a bathroom doesn't hurt either, (or some tweezers.)
Blue-Eyed Grass, Red-Orange Flames
When you walked in the back forty, just a jolly nickname for my backyard I had mowing,
I'd avoid butchering the tops off the blue flower grass and leave the buttercups that grew alongside them,
Oh, and watch for Dad's patch of four-leafed clovers out front. (And miss the bunny holes where the nests were keeping babies protected. ) The Blue-eyed grasses were so tiny, my treasures.
As I came upon this orange star hidden in the forest today, on another coast 30 years later
Had to think it might be the west coast grass version. Red, fire blazing, boldly flaring
If you pick it you take away something from the place, it wilts, told my son that.
Dad would put a blossom in my hand out walking, he would if there were lots there.
Blue-eyed babies, orange red stars blaze in this field of my dreaming
Nature gilded,
Mom says looking at the forest images that the blue ones were all along the walk on Richwood at home
"But you couldn't take them, they'd just wilt, and they need to remain there."
A warning, 35 years after we walked by, to let nature stay in her place.
Water
A drink in the well
Gives eternal life
They told the native peoples, Chumash,
That they worked to build
the Mission aqueduct routing the
Mountain water
Through stone channels
in service to the Lord.
It was certainly death
to those in the high mountains
As the graveyard to the left of the Mission
Contains eternally the bones
Of those not immune to the disease
Carried to them
By those with the
Good News.
I'm watching the water run
through the leaves and stones
today carrying away
Yesterdays truths.
Washing the rough edges
Of times and days
We did nor know
Or fully honor here.
walking today.
Excuse Me I Got er Rock In Me Mouth
"Minding me own business I grew up here on the bank o mud
No easy place for a seedlin to land
and got a lump of rock in my way
And since then its been nary a moment
Without hoisting it right or left in me jaw if I was to say something
Good thing trees is pretty quiet in the main
Because it's a lot of work to tell you this
"When growing on a rocky bank, expanding roots to
Crack the granite bed where you sit remember that
If you get a big rock in your mouth, a mouthful if you will
You need an ironman's jaw."
So said a tree today to me on my walk
In the wood looking for good Mother Willow
But finding Iron Mouthed Jack instead
Holding forth on rocks and the passage of time.
All I could offer was my remedy, "Just spit it out Jack."
"Minding me own business I grew up here on the bank o mud
No easy place for a seedlin to land
and got a lump of rock in my way
And since then its been nary a moment
Without hoisting it right or left in me jaw if I was to say something
Good thing trees is pretty quiet in the main
Because it's a lot of work to tell you this
"When growing on a rocky bank, expanding roots to
Crack the granite bed where you sit remember that
If you get a big rock in your mouth, a mouthful if you will
You need an ironman's jaw."
So said a tree today to me on my walk
In the wood looking for good Mother Willow
But finding Iron Mouthed Jack instead
Holding forth on rocks and the passage of time.
All I could offer was my remedy, "Just spit it out Jack."
My Father
We'd go walking at Cooper's Rock
When I was younger, just a little kid in a state park
where you could cook up pancakes in these huge open wooden roofed fireplaces
Dad would find beech branches walking for me and I'd chew on the bark
This toothbrush of the early americans he tell me
He'd find about everything and know the medicine
Or cure the mountains made of it
I can do that a little too, but as you know poultices
Aren't so much in style
In DG glasses land and on this Lexus coast
I can't find trillium anymore or
Wild roses, willow bark or the columbine.
Mountain laurels were often in bloom when we'd walk together then.
Such a long time ago.
I get a bit tired of being told to forgive my father
For ripping apart all of us to his tempers and fits.
I spent more time knowing him than anyone else, observing, testing, listening
Trying to help him with my presence with the raging
Doubts, rejections and pains, seeing him grab food
as if starved of all nourishment
I watched him lie, shade and twist
And also bend down in joy finding an arrowhead
Spotting a hawk, deer, drinking from a spring he discovered up a hollow.
I took a bit of sassafras bark from his hands and liked the fresh taste too
In our mouths, as we discovered a stand of blackberries
Huckleberries or wild strawberries hidden in the field.
He just has been ill all my life, in a brilliant mind there is rot.
There really isn't a forgiving
we just seem to be falling from grace without a way to stop
Lost footholds on the path as we were walking
And the gorge lies below us with blistering rough thistles burning
the flesh as you crash and flop twisting
Down in a tumble that is breaking the bones
Of your life. Is that a thing for forgiving? Really?
It's an accident, a tragic thing no one can stare away from.
We were walking at Cooper's Rock once and one of the rock climbers fell.
Dad insisted to me things were just fine and took me back to sit
and 'wait awhile', he said he'd go up and get us an ice cream
so I sat alone which was kind of strange, a very long time
(And he went to help this guy that might have died, snapped neck)
Dad was like this. Any number of times in my life we came upon horrible tragedies, wrecks
He'd tell me something like, " I think it'll be fine."
And then offer a distraction.
It was so like my father.
Dad, taking me for ice cream to distract me.
To help me forget that ugly death was just there lurking.
In The Canopy, My Heart
You haunt me even in a forest
Where I walk lightly
And carry no more false hope.
Looking up to spot the mocking bird,
In the branches, there is
The light filtering through
The heart shaped boughs
Framing the love shining into the underbrush.
If a picture speaks the thousand words this one contains the pain
I felt the last few years wrapped in the smile that my silence was worth it.
Dancing merrily away always separate, leaving you behind goes
My spouse off to take the kids down a trail into adventures without a look back
to see if you fell or are ever going to join him and the kids
At best sending back my son to "See what's keeping your mom"
As I grew not into a sarah or partner, but a figurehead, my role now as mother
Which any son knows is someone you look at as trailing behind.
Rings of Spiraling Time
Man sliced and diced
The redwoods in part to build
The Victorian I grew up in and loved
It was a kit that could be ordered
In a Sears magazine at the turn of the century.
(Freda told me that)
The attic smelled of dry rot
Our closets
Were cedar, good to stave off the moths.
Better to line the drawers where we kept our hope.
This is strange to process
Tonight as I look at the
Wedge of a redwood from a walking path
In a forest on a Santa Barbara
Woodland trail. It is cut
Welcoming you into the
Redwoods, that once were all
Along this coast.
You look at the rings.
It was born in 1100, as a tiny seedling
My daughter commented
When I rubbed my finger around and around
Over the rings of pilgrim times
And Dark Ages and looked
At circles of time, left here in the stump.
There was a ring for my year of birth
The rings of fire marking the 60's
The Civil war, Black Death
The burning days of man
when people vanished
And rings were forming.
Lightening took this tree
With decay and then saws,
Leaving this piece.
Now kids, my kids, can see
what once was a mighty redwood
Before man came to chop it down
To make bear Kitchen Pancake Houses
With real cedar beams.
Two Park Guys
Two Park guys were talking and raking the leaves
Down in the woods
Looking rather out of place with the rake.
"Do you rake leaves in a forest?"
They didn't hear my mumble.
I wanted to ask, but I was sort of listening to them
They were talking about something or another
That was exciting to them,
No need to interrupt.
I saw a picture I wanted to take
Acres and acres but it was just behind one of them.
So I said,
"Excuse me but I want to take
a picture of that star in the heart on that tree."
"Ok, sure."
My daughter very shortly came around on the trail.
To her they said,"Oh, hi, how are you doing
this fine day? Just fine I see.."
All of this said as I took my little Star heart photograph.
And watched my daughter look at all
Of us a bit perturbed, whatever.
"Come on Mom,
you can't photograph every square inch
Of this forest."
No I couldn't.
And Now The Trail Gets More Difficult
As we hiked our few miles there got to be a part of the day when
It just got harder to walk the trail
Steeper and slicker, you needed to stop froliking and talking,
concentrate on your footfalls.
Really at this place you couldn't take in the view
Of the forest in the same way.
The light and the sound closed in and it pulled
around you with a seriousness.
No one wanted to fall and it was possible to
Slip and get hurt.
In that way I thought of somewhere else
I tried to walk this year, another path.
That began in curiosity and joy winding through
Another kind of unknown, forest.
And in those trees that were sublime really
It narrowed to a simple path that was too steep, slick
And potentially a kind of fall.
I was with someone that went back, I think,
When I wanted to go on and see if we could climb over the rocks
We lost each other there at that place
Looking still for a way out of here intact.
Mother Willow
Mother Willow here you are.
Not even a willow now but an old Live Oak
You look so fit and well
Tell us of the wisdom of the ages
Hold on a second while we catch
Our breath we just crawled over the rocks
And hit the hard patch of trail
So how's Pocahontas fairing?
The Old World treated her
Much harsher than the new
We caught that on the cartoon network
We have a set of hummingbirds too.
Just like you do
They come nest in our front yard
We planted a bunch of ugly
Brushy things for them for the
Nectar...oh it's so good to see you
Momma Oak tree you look, well thinner
Actually and maybe a bit pale.
Not so many acorns here on the trail either
Has Poppa Moon been keeping other
Well, let's not ruin our visit with things like this.
The important thing is you are here now.
Mother Willow here you are.
Not even a willow now but an old Live Oak
You look so fit and well
Tell us of the wisdom of the ages
Hold on a second while we catch
Our breath we just crawled over the rocks
And hit the hard patch of trail
So how's Pocahontas fairing?
The Old World treated her
Much harsher than the new
We caught that on the cartoon network
We have a set of hummingbirds too.
Just like you do
They come nest in our front yard
We planted a bunch of ugly
Brushy things for them for the
Nectar...oh it's so good to see you
Momma Oak tree you look, well thinner
Actually and maybe a bit pale.
Not so many acorns here on the trail either
Has Poppa Moon been keeping other
Well, let's not ruin our visit with things like this.
The important thing is you are here now.
Address Unknown
we appear at an impasse
as i remember, your honor,
he said it was love and that it was real
god i hope so
i need to know that
was so sweet
pouring over the screen
liquid rush
sticky creme
thrush
in the bushes
well, it was a nice
moment.
and then when I said really?
he said no
wait
just kidding
gotta go home now
the forest is too dark and deep
for this
said it and did it
twice or thrice
the worst was when I needed to
believe again in the truth
of hearts beating
and love finding
away to
well you know..crush you
then he said perhaps no
for very good reasons
the craftsmanship of that
then said maybe
then said money
time
family
drink
health
highs
lows
you
me
and a thing about being a better man
somehow it just went like that
down the drain
santa anas to fire
and i said
talk to me
explain
but it was
time for a bus
or something
about a ride
and language
now my problem
beside the internal bleeding
god it bleeds everyday without yet
a scar
is the why of all of it
how
being told
to apologize
for my 'tricks'
or fits
or reactions
why
where
this feels like a rip
in the fabric of time
it's not healing
it's rupturing
christ i cant even look
at poptarts
eggs
dish soap
dog books
my fish
the library
walking
grover and the sky
writing on the pages
my blogs
stars
my skin
spirals
magnolias without crying
out about this
coltrane is a way to
try to hold invisible
thoughts
wrapped in herndon truth
and hopes
of changing
trying to do this
for a way to make a truth
longing towards something I must let go...
I kind of am lost
disoriented, confused
in the forest
and i want the address
of a good psychiatrist
just in case.
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