Danger on Peaks (6 page)

D
AY
'
S
D
RIVING
D
ONE

Finally floating in cool water

red sun ball sinking

through a smoky dusty haze

rumble of bigrigs,

constant buzz of cars on the 5;

at the pool of Motel 6

in Buttonwillow,

south end of the giant valley,

ghost of ancient Lake Tulare

sunset       splash.

S
NOW
F
LIES
, B
URN
B
RUSH
, S
HUT
D
OWN

A wide line of men in the open pine woods

diesel torches         dripping flame

lava soil         frost on the sagebrush

loggers walking from brushpile to brushpile

dark sky reddish from brushpiles burning.

At Sidwalter Butte three men on horseback

torches mounted on slender lances

crisscrossing miles of buttes and canyons

hundreds of brushpiles aflame

steady light snow.

I
CY MOUNTAINS
C
ONSTANTLY
W
ALKING

for Seamus Heaney

Work took me to Ireland

The river Liffey;

So many stories

A hilltop stone tomb

Peat swamps go by:

Endless fields and farms —

I read my poems in Galway,

And flew home thinking

The rows of books

The ranks of stony ranges

F
OR
P
HILIP
Z
ENSHIN
W
HALEN D
. 26 J
UNE
2002

(and for 33 pine trees)

Load of logs on

chains cinched down and double-checked

the truck heads slowly up the hill

I bow
namaste
and farewell

these ponderosa pine

whose air and rain and sun we shared

for thirty years,

struck by beetles          needles

turning rusty brown,

and moving on.

— decking, shelving, siding,

stringers, studs, and joists,

I will think of you       pines from this mountain

as you shelter people in the Valley

years to come

F
OR
C
AROLE

I first saw her in the zendo

at meal time unwrapping bowls

head forward folding back the cloth

to fill three sets of bowls each time

up the line

S
TEADY
, T
HEY
S
AY

Clambering up the rocks of a dry wash gully,

warped sandstone, by the San Juan River,

look north to stony mountains

shifting clouds and sun

— despair at how the human world goes down

Consult my old advisers

“steady” they say

“today”

V

Dust in the Wind

G
RAY
S
QUIRRELS

Three squirrels like,     dash to the end of a pine limb, leap, catch an oak bough angling down — jump across air to another pine — and on — forest grove canopy world “chug - chug” at each other — scolding empty space

O
NE
D
AY IN
L
ATE
S
UMMER

One day in late summer in the early nineties I had lunch with my old friend Jack Hogan, ex-longshore union worker and activist of San Francisco, at a restaurant in my small Sierra town. The owner had recently bought and torn down the adjoining brick building which had been in its time a second-hand bookstore, “3Rs,” run by a puckish ex-professor. Our lunch table in the patio was right where his counter had been. Jack was married to my sister once. We all hung out in North Beach back in the fifties, but now he lives in Mexico.

S
PILLING THE
W
IND

The faraway line of the freeway faint murmur of motors, the slow steady semis and darting little cars; two thin steel towers with faint lights high up blinking; and we turn on a raised dirt road between two flooded fallow ricefields — wind brings more roar of cars

C
ALIFORNIA
L
AUREL

The botanist told us

“Over by Davis Lumber, between house furnishings and plumbing, there's a Grecian laurel growing — not much smell, but that's the one that poets wore. Now California laurel's not a laurel. It can drive off bugs or season a sauce, and it really clears your sinus if you take a way deep breath — ”

B
AKING
B
READ

Warm sun of a farmyard      a huge old chestnut tree      just yesterday

the woman said      been raided by wild rhesus monkeys

we had boar meat,
inoshishi,
stewed with chestnuts    for lunch.

Deer, boar, monkeys, foxes        in these mountains

and lots of dams         little trucks on narrow winding roads

O
NE
E
MPTY
B
US

Jirka's place, a two-story farmhouse, the only one left in this narrow mountain valley. Drive into the yard of cars and little trucks. Several families sitting on the floor by the firepit, heavy board tables loaded with local food. It's great to see Jirka again — he's Czech. He and his Japanese wife have been here five years. Their daughter comes in, lovely young woman glancing. Jirka says “she's shy” — she answers firmly back in English, “Dad, I'm not shy!” Her name's “Akebi,” flowering vine. I swap stories with the back country friends that came to say hello, after years away. Upstairs was once a silk-worm loft. Jirka and Etsuko weave rugs using goat hair from Greece. A Rinzai priest from the nearby town drops in, planning a poetry reading with our old friend Sansei. Bobbu sings Okinawan folksongs with that haunting falling close. Children sit closest to the fire. Polished dark wood, sweet herb tea. Old house, new songs. After eating and singing, it's dark. Need to keep moving — back to the car —

N
O
S
HADOW

My friend Deane took me into the Yuba Goldfields. That's at the lower Yuba River outflow where it enters the Sacramento valley flatlands, a mile-wide stretch between grass and blue oak meadows. It goes on for ten miles. Here's where the mining tailings got dropped off by the wandering riverbed of the 1870s — forty miles downstream from where the giant hoses washed them off Sierra slopes.

We were walking on blue lupine-covered rounded hundred-foot gravel hills til we stood over the springtime rush of water. Watched a female osprey hunting along the main river channel. Her flight shot up, down, all sides, suddenly fell feet first into the river and emerged with a fish. Maybe fooling the fish by zigzagging, so — no hawk shadow. Carole said later, that's like trying to do zazen without your self entering into it.

S
HANDEL

I gave a talk one outdoor evening to some students at a park. After, sitting on the bench and drinking juice, crowd chatting, a slender woman with dark hair came by and flashed a smile.

She had her daughter with her, maybe nine. Also dark short hair. Introduced her, “This is Shandel.” I said “Please — tell me about the name Shandel.” The mother sat on the bench beside me. “Shandel,” she said, “is Yiddish — it means beautiful.”

And then she pulled her daughter toward her, cupped her head in her hands and said “like a
shandel
head.” And then she put her hands on the girl's cheeks and said “or a
shandel
face” — the young girl stood there smiling sweetly at her mother.

“Why did you want to know?” the woman asked me. I told her “I once had a dear friend named Shandel who grew up in Greenwich Village. She was talented and lovely. I never heard the name again.” — “It's not common — and Yiddish isn't either. I liked your talk — my daughter too.” — they strolled away.

N
IGHT
H
ERONS

At Putah Creek a dense grove of live oaks. Step out of the sun and into the leafy low opening — from within the tree comes a steady banter, elusive little birds — they shift back, move up, stay out of sight. It's a great dark hall arched over with shimmering leaves — a high network of live oak limbs and twigs — four or five big trees woven together. Then see: a huge bird on a limb, head tucked under, motionless, sleeping. Peering deeper, seeing others — it's night herons! Roost by roost, settled in. One shifts a little, they know someone's here. Night herons passing the daylight hours in this hall of shadowy leaves.

T
HE
A
CROPOLIS
B
ACK
W
HEN

Toula Siete meets me on the street, she translates into Greek from German and Italian. She and I are off to the Acropolis. We walk through winding back streets and around the east end to the south side walls and cliffs, go west past the semi-standing theater of Dionysus. Reach up and pick some rotten shriveled olives — so bitter!

Up the steps to an outlook ledge, a glint of sunshine, and we are above Athens. The modern city starts to fade. Toula's friend arrives and leads us on steeper steps past the small shrine to Bear-girl Artemis and into the territory of big clean slabs, pentelian marble, old stone newly stacked — lintels perched on blocks, old talus tumble.

Walk the porch edge of the soaring Parthenon, sacred to gray-eyed Athena. Slip into the restoration office by the cliff for tea. He is the director of the restoration project for the whole show, especially the Parthenon, Taso Tanoulas. He explicates the structures ruin by ruin, and explains the calibrated aesthetics of just “leaving be.” The city racketing around below. Chilly breeze — now see the housecat tribe gone wild in the scattered heaps of big stone blocks. This whole hilltop a “palimpsest,” Taso says, of buildings: Neolithic, Mycenean, Periclean, and after. Then I'm thinking, here's a good place for a bivouac — there's a spring, they say, a few yards down — people must have camped here when —