The yoke I bore was neither oiled leather nor long rein but being myself with all the expectations from everyone else. The hardest ground to plow was living fully without worry, not in the past gone on or future yet to come—but in the present hardpan now.
SOUND THINKING
the ocean gives
and takes
by time and tide
creates
and destroys with each surge—
lapping away at the edge
of what we know
I’m picking at leftovers—
scavenging
sharing surf with sandpipers and turnstones
plundering plovers
treasuring things the abyss didn’t want
the birds find morsels of mussel
and invisible things buried in the sand
I scan the broken bits of aliens
sent asunder by storms
constellations of fallen starfish
moon snails and angel’s wings
ripped from reef and wrack
empty houses, the deep dispossessed
lie sea-strewn along the St. Helena strand
a hermit repossesses the foreclosure
scuttles away with the deal
tucks away in security dealt by death
sure in the uncertainty each wave, washes to and fro
sheltered
by some confidence that I don’t possess
I saunter along the daily disaster dealt by the deep
hoarding truth into pockets
holding shards of sunlight
in a memory already full
thinking too much about what is
maybe wanting what isn’t
lacking a hiding hole
or a shell strong enough to see me through
I exist exposed on some intertidal plain
live naked
in between high water wishes and low tide wants
unbalanced on the shifting of should and should not
a gull hangs in the wind
and laughs at my indecision to just be
ON FINDING SWAMP RELIGION
There is forever here.
Some tree falling down
giving itself up to gravity.
Most do not surrender voluntarily, though.
Entropy comes as the grim reaper to woods.
As wind or flood or hungry bug,
makes dying the only choice,
the trees reclaim rightful place as moss
as mushroom
as litter mold.
Some hang on by tip up mound
a few roots still gripping earth,
the remainder with arms raised heaven high.
Can their rapture be far behind?
Still giving life.
Woodpeckers honor them with much pecking
genuflection and holes.
The Gospel According to Decay.
Everything is wet or dead—or will be soon.
I had a universe to myself.
Alone. No one else in my own image.
Thank you rain. And thank you for late sleepers;
and for others’ responsibilities to their four-wall gods.
They have theirs.
I have mine.
My gospel this morning:
Nothing is as it was,
Or will ever be
Again.
Others come to worship.
Peace be done.
Amen.
CHIRICAHUA DREAMING
Across rock-strewn folds, along rifts
sand drifts to mountains
sifts away in sudden rains
red stones burnish to bruised purple hues
from eagle’s eyes
a wandering across a cloud-strewn horizon
points the way
to nowhere
out there
and inside—
where the wild hearts beat
a canyon wren calls
tinkles like cool spring water down
my spine
the world’s weight
drop it
when forever flies over on a black hawk’s shadow
COMPASSING
Limitless is a faraway place
way beyond the hogback ridge named possibility
it’s over there
through a tangle-thick forest the old ones call maybe
it is a fortnight’s trudge through what could be
and at least as far as a strong man can chunk a stone
—straight as the crow flies
a hard tough row across the mind’s breadth
a frog’s hair from probable and head high from unreachable
you can’t get there from here;
but you can get here from there
it’s in the next holler
unfurl the map
aim the compass well
cause true north does lie
dead reckon instead on reality
find yourself there
BUFFALO TRACE
I watched an ant
trek across the landscape
of a bison skull,
antennae wavering
in wonder at the expanse
of great plainness.
It seemed a dry hard place to be,
a desert of dead bone with fissured canyons;
channels.
Dark chasms emptied of cow eyes
that once rolled wild, but void now,
plunging down into an empty cavern
where a bovine brain sat once,
remembering (perhaps)
ancestors uncountable on two-toed feet.
The intrepid hymenopteran traced
the narrow rims of those sockets,
scaled the peak of horn as if it were ant Everest.
Could it be that six legs
makes the wandering any easier?
Do its ant ears catch the echoes of herds past?
Can it sense the thundering rumble
under each little foot? The tumbling of a
band over a cliff to its death?
In and out. Up and down.
The tiny traveler made its way across
the abysmal plain to parts unknown,
packing nothing more than what ants carry
on such expeditions. No cut leaves
or sugar grains on board,
now seemed a heavy enough load
for its half dozen limbs—
or my four.
SOULFUL WARMING
cold creeps in
a gray chill settles
darkness fills
where sunlight fails
cardinal chants
in tangled bramble
towhee kick-scatters leaves
and care
take heart
grasp hope
feathers lighten
solstice’s darkening burden
brightening briefest day
FIELD MARK 73: HOW TO JUST BE
Real world means inside obligations to tend to. Widget making. Deadlines pressing. Bills always due. More and more four walls feels like a trap—a cage with no escape. Not being out; not wandering somewhere wild—seems sinful. There’s something wonderful I’m not witnessing. Some bird or beast flies or creeps by as I stare into someone else’s expectational chasm. It’s an expanse I’m increasingly unwilling to span. A new sun warms in brilliant hues. The same tiring orb sinks into the abysmal blue. When that coming and going cycles absent my firsthand witness, I’m squandering time. If wildness is a wish then I’m rubbing the lamp hard for a million more wandering moments.
COVEY OF ONE
Today,
searching for the hidden thing but not sure what.
Questing for hopeful
in open fields among fence lines and under forever horizons.
Birds sing
waiting for responses.
A single quail calls and waits for whistled answer
but no
ne comes.
He is a sad and wishful covey of one
having placed faith in what might never be.
Sparrows throw thin songs into tussocks of rank green grass
and in their wistful pleas I find a bit of what’s lost.
I am the tangled fence line gone to weeds in benign neglect.
I am more rusted barbed-wire than gleam and gloss
twisted loose and sagging each day more than taut-straight.
I’d rather bouquets of hawkweed, toadflax, and henbit
than vase-tamed rose any day.
That a meadowlark knows by heart the time
in passing clouds or brightness of sky,
perhaps tosses sweet bubbling notes
in some act of unknowable joy,
teaches me that there is little sense in asking why.
But rather,
that simply perching still in some momentary shadow of now.
I’ll sing a thin song too
in my fallow and overgrown thicket where love skulks
and hides within.
GRAVITY (ALWAYS WINS)
summer solstice soul searching
wondering in the shadow of a swollen moon
pondering time and tide
highs and lows
matching ebbs and flows
I wander about in the perigee of my own orbit
elliptically touching self-identity
only to be pulled away
by some unknown sun
slung into the apogeal abyss of space and uncertainty
I gaze skyward into the big orb’s glow as it torches trees
in cold light
and yet no fire burns
save those I ignite
I bask in the waxing
bemoan the waning
losing and gaining all the while staying the same
wishing for myself
my being
my own heaven to claim
NON-STATIONARY CYCLING
Year by year we count age in candles and stages. But among the woods and the wetlands, among wild things, life’s count does not stop for celebration.
Wandering in the winter woods yesterday, I sensed an urgency underneath the leaf litter. The damp mustiness hanging heavily in the decay ultimately means rebirth. Waiting seeds and warming soil are a promise for another season waged against weather and chance.
A doe’s skull found bare and shining ivory, on the white oak ridge meant end and continuance.
I wonder if coyotes make wishes on such things? Did the voided canid skull I found in the fern-full creek bottom mean that the god of wild things had exacted some kind of karma and taken a song dog’s life for a deer’s? I let lie the evidence to become something else.
Yes, there is something lying in wait in these winter woods—lying and waiting in root and stem and shoot—waiting for the sun to shine more purposefully, for the light to linger a little longer with each day’s passage. The wild ginger blooms modestly where no one can see. A wren sang somewhere in a shaft of sun that fractured the chill.
In the depths of what we call the dormant season, frogs a-peeping in secret pools and maples a-blushing against a bare-boned forest are sign certain that life will out and impatiently so—again and again.
BACK ROAD
day failing sun
burns evening blue
to twilight purple hue
then ignites pine-studded tree line
to saffron suddenness
each somber green needle candles into torch
each dying ray scorches memory
—deep
night stalks back road boundaries
time chases hope
and the light leaves in murmurs
sprinkled across stubble-strewn cornfield—
where the last lark song
lingers
and then settles on the fading edges
between seeing
and believing
FIELD MARK 5: HOW NOT TO WATCH BIRDS
Going out this morning to sit in my pickup truck on the side of the road to watch birds. To escape for a few hours in other breathing beings’ lives. To envy who they are. To revel for just an hour or two in their songs. But then, I hesitate, wondering what’s happened overnight? What city burns? Who’s alive? Who’s dead? Can a blue grosbeak change human plight? Can an eastern meadowlark’s territorial claim to sunrise, orange sky, or the right to breathe without death in the offing, become for a moment my own dream? Just thinking there might be some way to be where I am in my Black skin and not wonder if I’m being trailed, tailed, watched, surveilled, sized up to be brought down? Still thinking on it—whether I should go to some wide open field with clouds and grass; sit among grasshopper sparrows balanced on thin wires concerned with nothing else but being themselves. Lucky birds. Troubled man.
BOHICKET ROAD RAMBLE: FLASH FRY GENTRIFY
Slidin’ down Bohicket—
skinny black snake ribbon of two lane
all greased up n’ snot slick with spittin’ drizzle
tryin’ hard not to be one of the dead the live oaks claim
don’t wanna give my name to one of those roadside graves
epitaph scribbled skid-mark quick in asphalt
when the swerve came on too quick
a straight stretch can fool you when it suddenly ain’t
an unseen curve bent on killin’
memories lie deep in the oak wood’s tight-packed grain
three-hundred-year-old souls don’t budge for Mercedes
not even an S-Class or a Bimmer Z
those trees
—damn things—
gnarled and stubborn like crotchety old men—
given only to respecting the odd hurricane or two.
those old Bohicket souls
—beenyas—
done watched wildness come and go
seen skeeter-fested swamp change from Black hands to white
Gullah slave land to swamp worth not a red cent
That mucky hell came up for cheap sale
carpetbaggers moved down
made miserable marsh paradise
hunted duck
rode horses behind hounds chasing deer
got busy killin’
grew richer by the year
worthless sells for millions
dark folks that worked the land can’t even pay rent
them ol’ Bohicket souls done seen it all
but the finest German engineering don’t mean shit
when you big around as a house
steel and glass just turn to trash
when high end Euro speed meets old growth oak intent
Scraggly moss beards hang from every tree
southern comfort is what they’d seem to be
fluttering like flags in the sulphur funk of pluff mud
layin’ on the breeze
Ain’t much genteel about wood hard as concrete
that white cross tacked on the side oughta be ample sign
glimpses of haints roamin’ the pitch dark road on foggy nights
say slow down a bit
hug that yellow line
but then—
there’s always that one short on patience—
silver Lexus sedan riding my pickup’s ample ass
intent on pushing the legal limit
pressing me to do the same
Sixty-thousand-dollar cars ain’t gon’ wait
there’s better living ahead
The brunette chick in the rear view flew down I-95
Michelin rubber on fire
all Manhattean brown stone, tax-bracketed one percent
smug as a motherfucker behind polarized privilege
sped down here to leave the cold
found herself delayed
trailing my middle-class-dead-deer-hauling ride
my South Cacka pace is way too slow
high beams winka-wink for me to get the truck in high gea
r
Seabrook and Kiawah are waitin’ at land’s end
there’s a double gin and tonic somewhere near
in the third home with the grass clipped just so
and the whitetails that used to be harried
walking about like dogs prancing for show
’cause behind the guarded gates
camo and rifles ain’t likely to be found
no—the residential meat is more properly procured
organic-grass-fed-free-range-humanely-slaughtered cow
bought bloodless
kindly dead
delivered by the pound—
unblinking plastic wrapped and Jenn Air-grill bound
wildness Bohicket’s end done been tamed
owner associations’ dues assessed and paid
wild must be approved-prescribed
and the weeds only grow where the ordinances allow
All’s not lost though
there are still a few beasts to fear I’ve been told
monster golf course gators
beware that ten-footer on the ninth hole
that mofo is almost as long as an Audi Quattro Drive
If it’s in the pond then it’s clearly out of play
between you and me we’ll let bigass sleeping crocodilians lie
Beyond the McMansioned mentality
on the other side of my small-minded rant
across the brackish creek
where the sweetgrass dances and sways
the Atlantic’s surf is surging
the tide is moving in
somewhere
there’s an old shallow drafted johnboat a-hangin’
somebody’s ready to drop a chicken neck in the hole—
hook a blue crab on the line
float a cast net out
bring dinner in
maybe an ol’ boy will be wading in the muck
shotgun in hand—Low Country at heart
huntin’ for a mess of marsh hen
to cook up freshly plucked
with giblet gravy and sticky rice
Sparrow Envy Page 3