Leaf-skinned autumn earth
Treading on it
Climbing the path up black oak waving hill
Solitary horned owl hooting
Chittering kinglet, laughing pileated lord woodpecker
Complaining towhee kicking under manzanita
Their voices tread over hill also, deeper into felt-smooth dusk
Sitting on a boulder at the top
Kitkidizzee underfoot
Loud-toothed freeway in the valley
Eating silence
11
XI
21
Coffee-berry Hill
Moon past first quarter, Jupiter ascendant
Category: Uncategorized
Wandering up Yuba Canyon
Mid September rain Dark fetid cups now In hollows of blue-black rock shelves Angular metamorphics smoothed by old river surges Holding perched granite cobbles White on sand-strewn balconies above stream Flat as table cloths The forest Oak, ponderosa, maple, alder It leans in from both sides Ready to hear river’s long rap and rant Catching moisture Standing back just enough from its floods And we, much like kingfisher and ousel That chatter up and back We wander into the living narrow of earth Its rock gods Wood and water goddesses Showing mute faces that choose not to reveal Unless we linger Linger then Footsteps Rest long your glances Restless eyes Thoughts thrown up each moment with worries, plans and cares They too can be washed down by river voice Until naked Of thought, armorless Downstream wind becomes new fabric River It likes that humility That stillness well learned in the matter of turning rock Into cobble, cobble into skein of sand And I less smoothed, rounded and perfect than river rock None the less am more round for lingering here Student to the flow of things That turns and carries us all 21 IX 21 South Fork Yuba River Clear morning 1,980’
Three Lake Poems of Lassen
1
Calm sky
Endless forest
Early autumn quiet
Crackers, cheese and fruit
for lunch
Water low now
Its muddy bottom polished
In stillness
Cirrus pulling tendril threads
Over blue sky
Webs to catch our thoughts
As they rise idly
Into air
Summit Lake
2
Climbing down
To water
Guarded by block-barked Silver Pine
Narrow, droopy-topped Hemlock
Shadow-painted depths
That stuttering ‘kreek, kreek’
High in the sky
Sandhill cranes
Flying back north
across the dividing range
Unfurling clouds
Pausing to gape at their
Drifting, insistent
Flight
Shadow Lake
3
Autumn-yellow
Spirea
Edging the shallow
Muddy, green-yellow surface
Spears and crescents
Of refracted light
Haloing the cliffs
As one looks across
Towards lowering
Sun
Cliff Lake
26
IX
2020
Lassen National Park
Moon Waxing Gibbous
After visiting our daughter in Redding, a September day-trip led us to Lassen Volcanic National Park and a visit to a few of its glacial lakes. The volcanic rock holds fewer lakes than in the granitic terrain of the Sierra. So each lake is the more precious. Summit Lake is situated in open forest near the ‘summit’ of the main road that traverses the park. Shadow and Cliff Lakes are found along a 3 mile trail starting from a shoulder of Reading Ridge and both sit in glacial cirques carved out of the ridge. Forest is similar to the Sierra, but striking for its mature stands of Mountain Hemlock. Early autumn gave a crystalline clarity to the day. The photo is from the descent into Shadow Lake.
This Once
Sun turning day
This once
In the year
Unpicked persimmons
High in the tree
Ripening to translucence
Each its own miniature sun
Against cold sky
Robins chattering
In the canopy, pecking away
At the tight-skinned succulent globes
Even as we gather from below
With our long pole.
With sun dying
Forest, that swung its
Photon-catchers
Through the blue all day
Stands still, black figures
Chanting the silence
That frames
Low Jupiter and Saturn
In conjunction
One solstice star
This once
In some 800 years
As precious in its rarity
As each breath
I take.
21
XII
20
Cedar Wings Cottage
Moon waxing
Sky clear and hazy
Between storms
Since the Halloween Full Moon of October we have been watching bright Jupiter & Saturn appear in the western sky after sunset, day after day becoming closer to each other and closer to the sun, as the moon cycled twice through its phases and chased its tail two times along the ecliptic — all messengers of the great cycling. Persimmon trees are also messengers, its fruits each autumn ripening as large orange-red globes clustered in the tree tops bare of leaves, an ornamented ‘Christmas tree’ striking for its abundant harvest offered in the gathering cold and darkness of the year. This once, there was the conjunction of tree and planet, as we gathered the last fruits from a neighbor’s tree and with darkness walked from the house to a place where low Jupiter and Saturn appearing as one, sparkling between the forest silhouette of tree branches.
Birthday Song from the Hospital
For my Father
Worlds away on a wire my father sings a raspy hoarse-throated birthday greeting over the telephone He has always sung a bit off pitch though earnestly, marked back to rhythm by my mother’s truer voice This time though Each syllable that comes to me from him is a true island of being alive He is calling from the hospital after surgery raspy from pain, hoarse from Anaesthesia laying in a recovery room as if on a narrow, unrailed balcony suspended as we all are between life and death And I, who live far too much only in moments between those assuaging oceans of anesthetic neglect I too hover here on my imagined balcony looking down at the things undone, upward to the path-tokens of the way the 9/8 murmur of snow turned to rain in the gutters on the roof cat curled on the chair by the fire like an ouroboros and inward to the bell-tone muffle of my heart that passenger who travels the moments with me, mostly forgotten. Heart, tell me again my credo Give me pause to listen So that I walk well, pacing the moments each such a gift Hide not the sorrow or joy Let me have ears for both and let them pass on For I am my father in this moment and he sings not for my birth but for that thing that has always been unspoken between us That something that vibrates outside of wires or time, or any boxes of mind so that, mother, father, all we are a chorus.
26 March 2011
Of Poppies and People
Poppy Day
Years back
In Flander’s fields
I saw them growing still
edging rows of wheat
Along dirt tracks the tourists
And the tractors travel
Toward the heroes’ monument at Waterloo
Red poppies, Papaver rhoeas
French – Coclicot
In Ypres
One hundred years ago
They grew in fields disturbed
By trench and bomb
By muddy feet and shattered corpse
Blood red their petals
In an angry wind
A stubborn resurrection
Against all senseless
Death
Today, across the world
we wear facsimiles
Upon our chests
Walk solemnly to the grave
Of soldiers whose names
We will never know
So many did they die and so fast
In that almost forgotten global war
In America
We speak of veterans
And raise the flag
Ponder war and peace
And armistice
An end to wars
All good
To bow our hearts before the dead
And give all honor to those alive
My mother’s father
He was there
In France, while still a youth
Who somehow joined
America’s Expeditionary Force
And then returned, no poppies
Waving over his grave
Here
On California’s shores
Old European arguments fall short
We look to check our facebook feed
And armistice is a neglected word
We claim our holiday
And proudly stand with America’s might
Yet as I walk in fields
And canyons
Of this west-leading
Continent edge
I see our poppy
Gold-orange not red
catching the wind, coloring the land
What war or peace does it
Proclaim?
It whispers of a
genocide
In every hill
How love of gold
As strong and heedless
As each poppies’ painted petals
Like a battle wind
Came here and pushed
The native people out, enslaved
Or killed them
Glorying, Even to this day
In smiling forgetfulness
Knowing only the industrious heritage
Of crouching miners
Pick-axed adventurers
Nimble entrepreneurs
All of us, grateful inhabitants
Of a place we call
The Gold Country
So better on this
Armistice day
Remember all our wars
Our place within them
Our poppy gold
Not with greed or death
But with renewal
For people long forgotten
Still among us, speak:
We are Nisenan
Nisek humkawi
Wada’ di musek –
This is our homeland
We all survive here
11
XI
20
Sky clear, waning crescent moon
On Ancestral Homelands
Of the Nisenan
*Veterans Day, November 11th, began as Armistice Day, remembering the moment on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 when an armistice ended World War I. In part due to the poem ‘In Flanders Fields,’ written by the Canadian soldier John McCrea in 1915 after the 2nd Battle of Ypres, the red field poppy became a symbol of Armistice Day and a way to memorialize the dead and the living who went through that war. For that reason, in the UK, Armistice Day is often informally called ‘Poppy Day.’ The California Poppy, Eschscholzia californica, the official flower and a common symbol of the state, is not closely related to Europe’s red field poppy, though it is in the same family, Papaveraceae. The Nisenan Ancestral Homelands stretch from the ‘Sutter Buttes’ of the Central Valley to the Sierra Nevada crest, including the Yuba and Bear River watersheds. It is in this region that some of the most intensive gold mining in the state occurred.
Anisq’oyo, Peninsula of the Three Lagoons
Moon Sun Night sky turning its stellar seeds into the mesa Wind Rain Snouts and bellies of cloud crowding over the ridge Ocean Waves The on-again-endless Booming of whitened, clapping hands Pelican, gull, curlew Heron, tern, cormorant Egret walking the white shadow of dawn cambering wings All A garment of life Kelp skirting the strand marking the arc of the strand. All An edge upon edge Gulls swirling in morning light Anemone gesticulating in filling tide pools All Crossing the boundary of each Within them Anisq'oyo Within the sun's course, moon's course Night sky course Within the wind's high highway its hoop of rain Within the boundary of ocean, its limit of wave All circling here Surrounding you Anisq'oyo Deep rooted earth of the center All the dancing, turning of years winds, hours All the singing of things Is for you All the singing is you Empty my voice and fill it With your voice Empty my heart and fill it With your heart Wind voice, rain voice, pelican voice Cormorant heart, ocean heart, night sky heart Heart that is always singing itself To its own center Sing me, make me yourself Anisq'oyo 23 January 1984 Campus Point UC Santa Barbara
* The University of California at Santa Barbara straddles a wide, south-facing peninsula framed by two points – Devereux and Goleta Points – and three lagoons. This mix of academic, residential and open space with its small sandstone cliffs facing the Pacific and coastal plain rising quickly behind to sandstone-toothed ridges of the Santa Inez Range was my physical and intellectual home for both undergraduate and graduate work. During that time Chumash elders performed a public ceremony in the middle of this Peninsula and shared the Chumash name of the place – Anisq’oyo.
Songs of the Forest Canopy
Tracing the verticality of trees Eye seeking to match Ear's sound cloud to a single voice head back Breast pulsing to the cadence beat A trumpeter whose Repeated call Fills forest with Resound
Walking up the hill trail into neighborhood open space, just out the front door. Empire Mine State Historical Park. Adits and mine shafts underneath. The main mining building complex at lower elevation about a mile away. Second growth forest. At 2,600 to 3,000 feet, Mixed conifer / broad-leaf forest, dominated by Ponderosa Pine and Incense Cedar. Trails old mining roads, just wide enough to ‘physically distance’ in this time of pandemic.
Each morning now I walk as much into pillared, canopied forest with its scents and aerosols, its spring flowerings on the forest floor, its sunrise and morning light filtering through the trees, as into the spring sound cloud of bird song. Winter is more quiet in this forest, an emptiness that allows distant town and road noise to carry over the trees. Now each morning a dawn chorus erupts and I spend my time walking through its complex diversity of call and song. Not a symphony and not a cacophony, its ‘phonics’ is neither orchestrated nor discordant, more a multiphony whose organizer is the diversity of biological niches and the adaptive success of song strategies.
I am no expert. The sound-bathing, though, is therapy is these difficult times of fear, isolation and distancing. I let it wash over me and in moments the individuality of bird call stands out. Today it is the Orange-crowned Warblers, high in the canopy. Spotted towhees give their raspy call in the shrubs or underneath. At various points I hear up-down calls of the Black-headed Grosbeak, quiet ‘tsipt’s of the Juncos, drones of the Bewick’s Wren, distant calls of a Pileated Woodpecker, sweet whistles of the Yellow-Rumped (Audubon’s) warblers that I can follow in the canopy of the Black Oaks, gleaning insects off the emerging leaves and branches.
On the return, following the lower, still-muddy trail, one two-part song arrests me. Like all bird vocalizations it resounds through the trees and I cannot well make out how near or far away is the bird. I scan nearby cedars and ponderosas, then find it suddenly at a lower vista, perched on the top branches, still without leaf, of a Black Oak. At first I hesitate. It is a Dark-eyed Junco, with distinctive dark head. Yet I really only know the Junco from its short, repeated ‘tsipt’ that is so common in Sierra forests. This call is a bell-like, quickly repeated note, deeply resonant and sweet, followed by a second series, slightly lower in pitch, more metallic, almost harsh, yet matched with the first series to give a striking call-out into the trees. I watch carefully, and yes, the bird opens its small bill, pulls back its head, and puffs its breast at the same moment as the bird song again repeats.
Wonder. For someone familiar this is nothing special perhaps. For me it is a wonder, a scientific ‘discovery’ all the more sweet for its occurrence with such a familiar bird. Peterson’s Field Guide to Bird Sounds gives the visual spectrogram thusly:
And there it is, visually as I heard it — the two part song, the first more bell-like, the second more rattled-metallic. What is most striking upon examination through books and on-line resources is the diversity of vocalization WITHIN one species and with a single bird. There is the distinction between call, song, and alarm. The different sounds have different purposes and meanings. Then within each category there might be variation, particularly within the category of song, which often is meant to attract a mate. More variety is more attractive and more successful. Finally, there is great variation within a population of birds, especially across regions. Just as a Dark-eyed Junco varies greatly in plumage from California to Maine, so also do its vocalizations vary.
This is all part of the greater household in which I move and dwell. To be alive is to be part of a diversity and complexity so vast that it astounds…and welcomes. Should we not feel the more a part of it all for its diversity? We too have our diversity, our uniqueness within commonality, stacked assemblages of organism and event organized through similarity and difference. This is what holds the fabric together, gives it its oneness.
This morning I walk into myself singing the songs I have never heard before, that are my songs Walking beneath trees That are my flesh I laugh To be more tree And bird than me... With reverence I place this little me Like a stone Into a pool And let it join In the great resounding.
7 April 2020 Cedar Wings Cottage
Stevens Trail
Here’s to you, brave boys
Let me say it loudly
Outside Colfax
On the Old Highway Road
Near the start of our trail
The bronze plaque
Says you took the mountain
Stormed the citadel
Cape Horn
Blasting flat the railroad grade
Across a continent
You broke down the door
Let in the future
And here’s to you, laughing women
Of the canyon
Hundreds of feet below
We have hiked into
At the end of trail
Long way from road and town
You leave only your
Bedrock mortars
Shallow, easily missed, covered in ice
On this cold December.
The acorn way
Sunlit tree to stone
Meal to mouth
Belly to laughter
Back to sunlight
Let me whisper it quietly
In the cathedral bottom
Of this slate Sierra canyon
How you left markers
Of gratitude
No continent to cross
Everything already
Here
27 December 2019
North Fork of the
American River, 1300’
New moon & blue sky
* Stevens Trail drops 1400 feet from the outskirts of the town Colfax, originally Stop 20 in the long process that built the transcontinental railway in the 1860s. Like many trails in the Sierra foothills it began as a mining track, in this case turned into a toll road, named after a Truman A. Stevens. When built it traversed its way down into the North Fork American River Canyon crossing over to the mining town of Iowa Hill on the far side. Today, the neglected road has become a trail once more, a popular 8 miles or so (the BLM sign suggests 9 miles) round trip to the river and back.
* Cape Horn, location of the first double turn steep mountain obstacle in the building of the railroad over the Sierra coming from west to east, quickly became dramatized in the tourist guides of the day with tales of ‘celestials’ (Chinese) swarming like ants over the slopes in order to ‘storm the mountain citadel,’ some imagined to be dangling in wicker baskets held by ropes from above as they drilled into rock and set charges on dangerous sections of vertical cliff, sometimes falling to their deaths. All this was part of the aggrandizement of the railway both as an engineering marvel, an emblem of the age, and as a tourist wonder. The name Cape Horn recalls the crux crossing point in the sea journey to California, Cape Horn at the tip of South America, claiming here that this difficult rail crossing of the steep slate shoulder of the American River Canyon was its own crux enabling a new, futuristic crossing of the continent. In early years passenger trains would regularly stop at Cape Horn to let travelers admire the view down the American River Canyon.
* Bedrock mortars or grinding holes are places where indigenous people, here likely the Nisenan, prepared food gathered nearby, grinding acorns, seeds, roots or berries. These hemispheric depressions carved into hard, flat rock over a period of decades or perhaps centuries speak of the cultural continuity, so different from the ‘hot,’ disruptive culture of our modern experience, of a people deeply integrated into a landscape that is their grocery store and kitchen, gathering ground and sacred place.
When Morning
I.
When morning
Comes
Eating all its
Storm clouds
Unfurling photosensitive
Sky
I lie in bed
Surprised
Brother to the light
Striding through
My window.
II.
In little things
The magic
In little things
The power
Snowflake
On the tongue
Tranformer
Acorn
In the hand
Renewer
Pileated Woodpecker
Far in the forest
Laughing now
In my ear.
III.
Then
with the early birds
At the feeder
I say:
Earth
My catechism
Nature
My bible
Footsteps
My altar
Offering
Myself
15 December 2019
Cedar Wings Cottage
Clearing after Storm
Wishing you a Merry Everyone and a Holy Everything
Mountaineity 