Monday, September 27, 2010

From The Dry Side


Desert Conference 25

It used to be at Malheur Field Station,
with hospital beds, communal showers, water laced with arsenic.
We went as penance for living high on the hog somewhere else.

There were no comfortable chairs, no air conditioning,
we sought refuge outside and gathered late at night
and early morning in the Greasewood Room to tame our addictions.

Though we suffered long lines in the cafeteria, there was bird watching
at refuge headquarters,  and rendezvous at the flagpole
to plan strategy or head off together up Coyote Butte.

There were arguments about wilderness,
ranchers raging about coyotes,
and management plans that killed one animal to multiply another.

I always fell in love, with some handsome man whose
eyes glittered in sunset and words were passionate
about something living with sagebrush

I always stopped at Glass Butte for obsidian,
at Safeway for snacks, and at the first sightings
of yellow headed blackbirds or sandhill cranes.

I saw big horn sheep up Home Creek canyon,
I piled into a car for Malheur hotsprings at midnight
and woke at dawn to see sage grouse at their lek.

This year the conference was held at Big Muddy Ranch,
lately owned by Young Life, formerly by the Bhagwan.
I tried not to feel menace in the swarms of teens cheering their food.

But when we hiked out towards the John Day river,
into the tan September grass and the scrolling hills
I could not fault our location.

In the desert our handiwork is most obvious,
each road or radio tower or fenceline
is our fault and job and joy to remove.

I came from New York, informed only by a song
about home on the range where deer and antelope play.
All these years, it still sings to me.

Monday, September 13, 2010

Catholic Upbringing


Circumnavigation of Ross Island

Once there was an island, home of bald eagle, osprey and muskrat,
but man got there and started sorting the sand and gravel into piles and hauling it all away
digging deep into the belly of the island,until only a question mark is left,
just enough land for a fringe of trees,
just enough to reveal a beach at summer’s end.

We put in the kayaks by the science museum
repurposed from a steam generating plant, now prettified
with a bright red smokestack.  The water is smooth
as we paddle upstream, under bridges, past the gravel
conveyor, and pilings from the old days when logs tethered
in rafts waiting to be towed downstream to a mill.

Now there is clever graffiti and a few tents of the homeless
and Sunday cyclists on the bikepath, although a dull roar
belies the idyllic scene, droning from vehicles passing over the bridges
and down  I-5 and McLoughlin boulevard, plus the occasional
closer whine of a waterskiing boat.

Nonetheless, it is lovely to be on the water in the sun.
An osprey circles, a big fish jumps, a dozen white sails
follow each other in a circle, surrounding an instructor,
it is enough to make anyone happy and I am
And yet,  there is doubt that this  redeemed waterway
is proof of recovery or an incongruency
in the greater story of human decay.

When we come back to the dock the same sunbather
is there as when we launched.   He is thin and gray haired,
stretched out next to his bicycle, wearing only a thong.
He could be a nudist without a suitable beach, but his gaunt
skeleton reminds me of the depiction of Jesus taken down
from the cross, a warning
for the acts of contrition to come.

9/13/10

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Getting Warmer


Ribbon of Highway

Trees, rivers, clouds, mountains;
elements repeat in random combination
next to slippery lines of vehicles
following each other at furious speed
up and down the Northwest corridor.

There are big and little boxes of humanity
crowded around nodes of population, but the blur
of the drive between Portland and Vancouver
is still the leafy comforter of nature.

I calculate my carbon dioxide production
to be five hundred pounds there and back,
for reasons I call necessary, but I feel guilt.
It seems like plants will save us from ourselves
right up to the moment they can’t.

9/11/10

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Late For The Sky


Termination of the Biologic Imperative

The world has had its way with me,
a long descent under a parachute of experience,
billow of stories, and harness of expectation,
now collapsed, packed away, small as a tampon,
restored intrauterine,  the end to all that.

The world has had its way with me
and I have stuck to my bargain, producing offspring
inoculating against despair, launching into air,
but now I am depleted, infected with age
ready to reconceive myself as a crone.

Soon my world will be riddles and weeds,
devoted to potions from rocks and animal cries
singing long songs of historical lament
tatting doilies of complicated verse.

The world is heedless of our slow passing,
we are embodied only to embody another
cognition mere hobby beside the genetic,
happiness a mutation of stubborn irrelevance.

9/2002 and 2010.