#Americans
The sour smell, blue stain, water squirts out round the wedge, Lifting quarters of rounds covered with ants,
A few light flakes of snow Fall in the feeble sun; Birds sing in the cold, A warbler by the wall. The plum Buds tight and chill soon bloom.
One granite ridge A tree, would be enough Or even a rock, a small creek, A bark shred in a pool. Hill beyond hill, folded and twist…
I first saw it in the sixties, driving a Volkswagen camper with a fierce gay poet and a lovely but dangerous girl with a h… we came down from Canada
Every tan rolling meadow will turn… Freeways are clogged all day Academies packed with scholars wri… City people lean and dark This land most real
Ah to be alive on a mid-September morn fording a stream barefoot, pants rolled up, holding boots, pack on,
Washing Kai in the sauna, The kerosene lantern set on a box outside the ground-level window, Lights up the edge of the iron sto… washtub down on the slab
“O hell, what do mine eyes with grief behold?” Working with an old Singlejack miner, who can sense The vein and cleavage
Out there walking round, looking o… a rootstock, a birdcall, a seed th… plucking, digging, snaring, snaggi… barely getting by, no food out there on dusty slopes…
One afternoon the last week in Ap… Showing Kai how to throw a hatche… One-half turn and it sticks in a s… He recalls the hatchet-head Without a handle, in the shop
Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw… I slept under rhododendron All night blossoms fell Shivering on a sheet of cardboar… Feet stuck in my pack
Beat-up datsun idling in the road shreds of fog almost-vertical hillsides drop awa… huge stumps fading into mist soft warm rain
Izanami gave birth to rocks, trees, rivers… and last, a blazing child so burned she died. In the land of darkness
Owl calls, pollen dust blows Swirl of light strokes writhing knot-tying light paths,
At the last turn in the path “goodbye—” —bending, bowing, (moss and a bit of wild
