Sunday, December 22, 2013

A PATH TO RIDGES



History



A vision revealed 
Where I must go 
To find the secrets 
Of another life:
A dirt road, overgrown
With red maids and popcorn,
Winding up the hill
To the first ridge overlooking
Sycamore Creek. Surrounded
By fiddleneck brighter
Than gold, the miners left only
Dynamited holes
Near house pits
Trampled by cattle.


Redbud near Pounding Stone

I scrambled
Next to waterfalls,
Through primeval woodlands
Until I found, on the second ridge,
A pounding stone, a pestle
Near mortars brimming 
With water, a bobcat 
Flowing by me less
Than five feet away. The slope


Pounding Stone
Near Confluence of Three Streams

Grew steeper as I struggled
Up the faintest trail
To the confluence of three streams,
Finding another pounding stone
And house pits on a ridge a few
Hundred feet from the top
Of the hill. In the wetness,
Under the buckeyes and oaks,


Personification of Over Soul

I felt a presence, so foreign
To me in this life, but so familiar
To my soul, that I performed
A ritual of adoration for
The Over-Soul, as if 
I had come back
To this ridge after
Many lives to experience again
Timeless currents 
in the vast fields
Of earth and air 
and water and light.


Ancient Trail

I returned years later,
Straining the rest of the way
On hands and knees to the top,
Discovering an open pit
So deep I couldn’t see
The bottom, a semblance
Of the old Kings flowing
In the dried up reservoir
Off in the distance. Perhaps
I lived here once before
As a man digging
Holes his entire life,
Or as a shaman
Calling the spirits,
But at the summit,
I felt once again
One spirit flowing within
Everything we can know.


Wednesday, December 18, 2013

A PATH LEADING TO CATTLE



River Canyon



On the way up, I needed 
words to calm myself, 
on this winter day when smog 
smothers the valley again, grays 
the rocks half a mile away                               Take a different path.
where the creek shines like chrome.
All afternoon I explored the paths 
webbing down to the creek
where pounding stones and trails 
are all that remain of the tribe 
that once settled on cleared, 
gentle inclines. I ventured up 


Squaw Leap

the steep slopes toward the top 
to claim it as my own in the late                         Take a different path.
afternoon sun. For all of an afternoon 
I trespassed, perhaps not meant 
to look down anymore 
on the grayness below that never 
clears. At the edge of the cliff I lost myself 
easily in the breath of trees and grasses, 
above chemicals ruining mind
and body, knowing I cannot protect             Take a different path.
these hillsides. Not long ago 
the tribe was ravaged by sickness 
and finished off by murder and 
starvation, the air and water 
and the remaining creatures no longer 
belonging to the earth. I have always 
kept some faith in my feet, and I hiked 
past cattle that fled in absolute terror 
of me or refused to budge 
when I approached, all
without horns. Those animals                            Take a different path.
could have done me great harm, 
but didn't. I have brought you here 
to the edge of this cliff to remember 
the valley as it was before the earth 
was sold. I will remain
as a few magic words that fly 
from this cliff over the valley 
to write the language of flowers 


Baby Blue Eyes and Goldfields

gone forever, to bear witness 
for the air and water passing 
through everything living, to ease 
the desolation of those who believe                   Take a different path.
that all must wisely share the earth, 
and although I may not even be meant 
to be the voice, my words will take you 
part of the way, past the last trees 
to the rocks at the top behind which 
a mother is lying beside her newborn calf, 
a young bull grazing, so powerful 
and unconcerned you might think them 
godlike and pure, untouched                         Take a different path.
for generations, the huge horns 
without garlands, without blood. 

Saturday, December 14, 2013

PATHS LEADING TO DESTINATIONS

Ancient Path Kept Distinct by Cattle




I park near a load of rubbish 
dumped by the road, and, struggling 
up a hillside, follow a path not sure                Take a different path.
it is thousands of years old, but finding

destinations, the leaves of sycamores 
floating onto pounding stones
or into the stream where they are dragged 
along by the current and sucked under.                  Take a different path.

By the pounding stone, a lip 
of earth extends from the slope, 
large enough for a bed. 
A house pit? Below that,
                                                     Take a different path.
rocks stacked on 
each other--a miner's grave? 
Beyond the creek, five trails 
join at a hub between the river

and the creek, where a rancher 
dropped blocks of salt, the questions           Take a different path.
asked a moment before lost 
in the grass, empty in the curl 


Pestles in a Pounding Stone

of a leaf. According to mystics
 the ether contains records
of every moment within eternity, 
a memory of every individual                 Take a different path.

experience within the physical
plane. Somehow I know where
to find the pounding stones 
and house pits and trails 

along the creeks, as though some                        Take a different path.
inner sight has been granted me--
a man powerless, gauche, 
and unworthy. Wildcat Mountain 

looms in the distance from many points 
of the ancient trails, the distance 
undisturbed, no one approaching 
with news of forces sent to capture me        Take a different path.

or drive me off the land, 
the mansions planned 
for forty acre lots. I dig 
into mortars brimming 


Fiddleneck in Housepits near Pounding Stone

with grass and earth, the dry 
oak leaves needling my fingers, 
the pounding stones deep 
as icebergs, the air, smelling                      Take a different path.

of rain, still in the quiet woods. 
I dig out a pestle and turn 
the tapered end
toward the hub. This web
                                                   Take a different path.
once kept a community
alive, yet I
am lost, searching 
the valley for signs 

of the city in the smog                                 Take a different path.
and finding none, nothing keeping
the rancher from selling off
to some developer, the trails,

snaking between buckeyes 
and oaks, etched for thousands
of years in the earth, always 
vanishing in the grass.

Friday, December 6, 2013

A PATH TO GHOSTS



Pounding Stone with Pestles



A ghost cackles a warning, falls 
like an arrow before flaring its wings, 
plunges towards headstones, then rises,
lost in pines. Leaving Clovis Cemetery,

I parked under a cloud of stars 
near massive oaks, an animal warmth 
emanating from the rough bark,
the sun still inside the cells

of everything breathing. I breathed 
deeply, as often as I could pay attention 
to my breath, the sea of smog 
just below me. Ages ago, 

you taught me the ways of birds,
and I sighted a woodpecker winging
from one oak to another, clinging
to the top branches. A meadowlark 


Close Up of Pounding Stone

tilted back its head, its call bubbling
over the grassland. A shrike stepped 
from a twig, free-falling, floating 
up above its prey--to impale 

on barbed wire for its cryptic 
butcher-shop cache. No one kept 
the houses from crowding closer.
Caked by cow droppings, 

paths still weave into clearings, 
mortars the only sign, roots 
pulling the tribe upward into petals
of goldfields and lupine, high

into branches and leaves, 
into air. Went down 
on my knees before 
the pounding stone, so many


Pestles on Pounding Stone

herds and flocks invisible
in the currents of breath,
and once again heard the cackle 
and pounding, felt the fierce

shadow flowing over me 
like a ghost, the mortars
empty as eye sockets, 
portending an end 

without grace. Did I sleep, 
hearing the meadowlark
as one momentary ring appeared
on the water, then another, the petals

of the purple chinese houses 
beginning to tremble, the oak canopy 
awake with quiet tapping, whatever 
I needed to say lost

in the still sound vanishing 
gradually with my dreams, 
all the roots quietly sucking up the rain, 
the creek beginning to flow again?

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

HOW TO SAVE A LIFE



Flowers by the Creek




They arrived in a junky Ford at dawn:
The King is dead--how can we go on? Mid
August, a light rain lacquering the asphalt,
our wheels meandering to Bear Creek. As I slammed
the door shut, a tiny pine cone stung my face.
Chasing each other through dense brush,
down a steep slope to the stream, splashing
through rapids, sliding down stones, our 
pants soaked--how easily we could have
broken our necks, but I kept up even though
they were two years older. (I had spent
ten years keeping up.) Wordlessly
picking sides, my buddy and I cornered
the catalyst of the battle, pelting him
with tiny cones, and when we ran out 
of ammo, the enemy nailed us both 
and careened away, vanishing in manzanita.
Minutes later, a stone crashed through
the canopy, thudding nearby. Another stone,
the size of a fist, hit the humus five
feet away. We screamed threats at them,
but rocks rained down as we raced up
the slope, the battle petering out
when we cornered them, my buddy
holding me back. We chirped with joy
all the way back to the car. Thirty years
to the day, it hit me as I woke up:
They must have known--in early May,
I had been caught naked in a car
and shamed by the police, my best friend
no longer allowed to see me. My father
had died in late May, but my friends
didn't mention that either.


Larkspur by the Creek

So I returned to Bear Creek, the terrain
more treacherous than I remembered,
and struggled through dense brush to the first
boulders by the road, nothing beyond that familiar.
I hiked over fallen trees, broken branches,
until the slope dropped off abruptly, the creek
hundreds of feet below. As I thought about
turning back, I slipped on loose gravel and fell
flat on my face. Shocked by pain,
I felt weak, a little sick, the blood pounding
in my ears. I thought, if I passed out, I
might slide two hundred feet down the slope
onto the rocks below. 
                                 C'mon, get up.
Shake it off, I told myself, because that
is what my friends would have yelled at me.
I stood up, legs wobbly, and struggled
up the hill to safer ground, almost
passing out before I plopped down
on a smooth stone. As I slumped,
I remembered how, once, when
I couldn't stand, they grabbed me
under the arms and pulled me up,
steadying me until I could lurch forward.
That, I muttered to myself,
is how you save a life.