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views of the country

I. Scablands
I trace symbols on my knees–a language
more felt than remembered. The sky is burnt, burning.

II. Wheat Fields
The air tastes like salt. The rest stop is nowhere near water.
The ways between us are like salt. How can I be drowning?

III. Big Sky
The Rockies frame what they cannot touch;
the sky is in your cheeks.

IV. The Cascades
Mist curtains summer pines. You
lean to whisper–but say nothing.

V. Yorkshire Moor
Purple heathlands jag along deep, cool forest.
Between them: a low stone wall.

VI. Hadrian’s wall
Small unmortared stones stand two thousand years.
If we do not jump it, it is because we do not wish to.

VII. Country gate
We hurdle the wooden gate whose iron latch has caught.
We cross a trail that we’ve walked before, never walk again.

VIII. Yorkshire Moor
Oxfordshire cumulus and breezes from the south;
In the farms hidden behind the hills, the new sky.

IX. Stratford-Upon-Avon
Outside the tourist paths: a vast cracked wasteland, thirsty earth;
or plowed soil waiting for November seed.

the redwood

One in Idyllwilde caught my eye;
a black spar in a stand of monterey pine.
Want bent it in half.

Resin wept
from swollen cankers
in the sultry august air.

Mighty and geometric,
rivulets of ants
hauled sap & meat like thieves
into the dirt.
Around it rock pigeons
gawked.

In the flurry of wings,
rising like smoke,
I perceived
the hollowness
of dead things,
the rings of centuries
polished by winter.

Yet growing in its broken crown
was a sapling,
needles springing from or towards:
a flame, a tongue, a heart.

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