In the Woods
Between dreams, desperate,
I stare at the sun’s slow
swing, a hypnotist’s crystal.
Tell all the truth, it says,
tell it slant. How else,
walking lightly on the earth,
can I tell it? Through
jigsaws of shagbark and briar
I map paths with my eyes,
sudden openings and arches,
then weave through. Of the Tao
it is written, Look,
you can’t see it. So here I am
looking, hooking east with
the brook, sun now a rickrack
of light on bare branches,
a screen of white silk on the sky.
From above it’s not bright.
From below it’s not dark.
Where then is the gate to its mystery?
I lie down in the leaves by the brook.
I fill with dark sky. And the trees –
Seen from a slant, what are they
but slashes of reed, the loose
weave of a basket or cradle.
Rocking deeper asleep,
I walk the high ridges.
Granite ledges jut out into air.
Still as centuries, pale lichens
bloom, here on the stones,
the whole planet a prayer wheel.
I sit down in this thought,
unwinding myself to a thread,
a bit of mooring left by a web
when the wind’s torn through.
Briar rock blossom brook –
the Tao I can name is not
the eternal Tao. But here I am,
lightly bound to this life –
and the mystery I look for,
I’ll call it the new moon,
a darkness within darkness.
Watch it rise.
To Say Nothing of God
Fattened all summer on wild raspberry
sarsaparilla pond lilies Bedded down
at noon in thicket of laurel and witch hobble
its pelage a rufescent shade near hazel
the rough boss at the base of its stark
crown like oak bark the stag
sensing me near may have then pressed its head
to the ground in camouflage its antlers
branches of red cedar sharply tipped
Or the riven staves of shagbark the lightning
sheared off in August And I continuing
to gather mint where the pond spilled
into the brook and I continuing to float
with the water skimmers and the clouds
And I adrift in the burr of grasshoppers
in the field lit by sun by mourning cloaks
and monarchs Now it’s months past velvet
past rutting and I’m wandering
the winter slopes of dark cedars crossing
the Iichened walls that rib the open woods
Even now I might have missed the buck
dead in its winter blue coat
a thick fur I wait for the wind to riffle
No sign of breath or struggle for breath
or wound Neither swollen nor caved in
at the belly Fallen on the run its limbs
splayed out A frozen gait so like its ancestors
drawn on the cave walls of Lascaux
And in my mouth breath of its breath a keening
akin to the Anglo Saxon and to the Slavic
roots of wild spirit beast breath god
In January I chance to find where the buck
first fell before he gathered
heavily each muscle each neural fibril
each stellate cell and rose up
from the running cedar and mast and woodbine
to dear the tumbled wall to clear that last
acre of silence leaving behind him shadowy
a flurry of coarse white hair tufts from
its tail and heaving belly You are not
this body which is born and dies
on the surface of infinite mind These
are words rising out of me Do I believe them?
Soon after sundown the coyotes come
their shrill arias rising into a snow of stars
And the wind that blows quietly freely
without striking words follows me
down to the buck And the wind flows over
the flattened blue-flecked iris of the buck’s
open eye The fox and the shrew eat
their fill I visit the buck each morning
I just stand there and look I don’t know
why I do it One hind leg torn
off the haunch socket flung over the shorn spine
The clean cave of the belly soft parts eaten
the waste already shunted hot from the coyote’s
anus Wind nests in the carcass Only a ridge
of frozen meat pale carnelian on ribs that curve
like the tines of a rake These are the spoils
Before the squirrels eat the antlers for calcium
we shear off the head and hang it
by a cord from a rafter in the barn It turns
slowly five feet in the air
Not a trophy not a graven image We want
to bring skull and antlers inside the house
To watch our comings-in our goings-out
To turn us from daily parrying
This task and that So crowded out of life
we forget ourselves The deer skull
we boil gently scraping it clean with a scalpel
oiling the antlers We hang it
white against a white wall above a wainscot
of native hemlock Sun and then moon fill
the windows The antlers pattern the wall
with branched shadows shagbark and oak
Light drifts into the curious reefs of lace
alongside the bone snout it roots
in the feathered edges where the bone plates
meet in a line that resembles the zigzag
of inlets and outlets seen by a hawk
above the archipelagic shore I don’t know
what to make of the cribbled disk at the base
of the skull Or the eye sockets entirely open
And set so far to the side of the head I can’t
match my gaze with its own I touch my face
Jut of brow and cheekbone I touch the emptiness
these will someday circle and the light
that will blaze when this body intricate
coracle loosens and dissolves borne away
If I should look for this place a century hence
the Infinite focused anew in a body
now of antler and fur my long bones precisely
hooved stepping deftly into the open glade
over a dusting of snow like today’s I should hope
to be graced with an attention so keen
I’d miss no creak of wood no distant whir
on the hard road no tilted glide overhead
in the pine grove By then this house would be
simply a rib of stone wall a slumped hollow
for woodsearth and bramble This pond a mere seep
beneath wiregrass No evidence of otter or cattail
No sign of the spruce we planted in the field
No black spikes of cedar on the ridge Although
a tremor in memory may lift that antlered head
toward where they grew once Orion rises
and strings its bridge of years on fire
across the emptiness I glimpse between them
Perhaps I might then in the luck of being alive
be grateful enough not to mind the neon glow
still sprawled across the night Grateful perhaps
and enough at peace to sense boundless presence
in whatever space is left open too empty to profit by
Glad for goldfinch and junco puffed in the winter lilac
And for the sumac tall at the edge of the road
That bold candelabra lifted into lemony winter sun
I want to look ahead and know these acres of earth
survive our human ignorance and greed The air
still clear enough to breathe Random stars Staghorn
sumac Deer tracks in the snow
And the task at hand? To disappear
where I stand But to stand
in near tones of hush and mist in the early
winter of morning bottomland To stand
in my body of ridge and pine the sun turning
lunar and silken And the task at hand?
To mark the trail with a thick ring of bone
slipped over a bare ripple of wild blueberry branch
Where marrow was an arrow of air
points toward the pine grove the barred owl’s
warren of rabbits To be here simply
on a trail deer have etched into summer earth
And to know that the ground of the poem is
oak leaves underfoot deer droppings
bright as black beans a rumple of lichen
on cold stone a possum’s jawbone
the teeth still sharp And these words
a temporary blaze a dust of snow