He left the cities behind.
He trudged into the wilderness
seeking the god whose words
are weaved in wood, his backpack
like a steely carapace
shielding him from the sun.
He joined the serried grasses
of the field in their slow green
war of survival and destruction.
He sent us letters, etched
with a stubby pencil, printed
because we could not read his writing,
a loose plenum of graphite bones
treading the white water of the page.
He wrote that he was trying to live à terre
like the king who spends his life in the saddle.
He wrote that he was dedicating himself
to the transcription of realities.
He wrote that he was weary of “endless
first person confessionals wrung from
the pistils of wilting flower souls”
In his free moments he would collect
metaphors like beanbags and toss them
about:
“the ribs of the earth bunch together”
“mountains gather like lowing cattle”
“the sun is a great golden cock and
the moon the pale abyss of an empty womb.”
He formed phrases like freshly bought
candles, their wicks still clean,
calling them sutras rather maxims
since he like the eastern flavor of the
word:
“breath falls from the lungs and is not caught”
“it takes more than two legs to leave”
“the rain does not choose the forest or the plain.”
From the ashen and igneous earth
he excavated melted glass bottles,
decanters, demijohns, forgotten figurines.
In the high grasses he lay like a planchet
awaiting the stamp of whatever realm would
claim him first, to be spent accordingly
on boots wine tallow or mutton.
In his dreams he was a hard kernel
of a man, no meat within the seed.
In his dreams he was a meaty man
with love flourishing in his soul.
In his nightmares, from the dizzying height
of the falcon’s aerie, a host of many-footed
symbols came rushing toward him,
furry and junctured and carrying flags,
a youth with the wings of a bat,
a meniscus moon, a japanese dagger,
a broken bird, an old man with fool’s gold
in the pinks of his eyes…
He wrote that by summer his money would be gone
and he would travel south with the sun
to sleep on the warm beaches among the mottled shells,
to mix among the dark races and drink their strong beer
and laugh with dark laughter for their women
until the moon was replete and brimming.
The rain does not choose the forest or the plain.
The tiger does not know that it is tiger named.
---
Appeared in Berkeley Poets Cooperative
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