So I'd like to share a few more points from my recent book,
by most recently published book of poetry--
Danger and Peace.
And I don't think most of you have heard these.
I don't think I've read them in public much,
certainly not down here.
Exploring some other possibilities.
Danger and Peace is built around Mount St. Helens
up in the southern part of the Washington Cascades
which erupted in 1980 in May and shortened itself
by about 1,200 feet.
It blew off about 1,200 feet of hummus, gravel, sand, rock--
what they call tephra--
and all sorts of things.
Actually, a rather modest eruption by some standards,
but it certainly got everybody's attention in the area.
And, finally, in the year 2000, I went back up there
to look at it--
that was already 20 years later--
and see what had become of the mountain.
It was very dear to me because Mount St. Helens
was the mountain I first climbed in my mountaineering life
when I was 15 years old.
I climbed it from the north side and spent several summers up
around Spirit Lake and Mount St. Helens.
And, strictly speaking, I don't call it Mount St. Helens.
Like many of us in the Northwest, we call it "Loowit"
or Lawetlat'la which is the INAUDIBLE name of it--
the Native name of it.
And that's part of a program that some of us
have-- and, you know, more goddamn political correctness
by giving Native American names to all the mountains, which
we're working toward bit by bit, at least on the West Coast.
Shasta is already a native name.
That one has been solved.
Mount Hood In Oregon is Wy'east Mount St. Helens is "Loowit"
or Lawetlat'la Mount Adams is Klickitat Mount Rainier is
Tahoma.
You hear that sometimes.
Mount Shuksan is a native name.
But Mount Baker-- boy, what's the name for that?
I don't remember.
Anyway, we're working on it.
It'll take decades.
Oh, and Denali is actually working out.
Mount McKinley is no longer on lots of maps.
It's now Denali.
So that can be done.
The state of Alaska actually adopted a guideline
that said no more non-native place
names in the state of Alaska on the maps.
And that's a good thing because there
are huge swaths of Alaska that have no names on the maps yet.
And yet Jim Carey, who's in the linguistics
and Native languages study program
at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks,
and this is really his field--
Jim says, I've been out there talking
to the Inuit, the Inupiaq, the Yupik, and then
the Athabaskans, the Puyallup, and so forth.
Everything on the landscape they've got a name for it
if you ask them about it.
Every corner of the river, practically.
And he says there are all kind of stories about what happened
there, what people saw there.
And none of them are ever named after some faraway girlfriend
or a president.
So I was very touched to get back to Mount St. Helens
and to discover that although it had really been blasted
and all of the trees for miles around had been laid flat.
And they'd been they'd all been laid flat
going the same direction-- the direction of the blast.
But it was coming back very nicely
with a little silver fir, about this high,
and pearly everlasting bushes--
big white wildflowers, which you probably
know because they're not uncommon.
But they had sort of taken over the hillsides--
the pearly everlastings and the silver fir.
So I wrote a poem about that called "Pearly Everlasting."
It's about the flowers that came back,
and it's about all the dead bodies of the trees that
were laid out on the ground because when the young Prince
Shakyamuni was thinking of going into the forest
and becoming a yogan and working on understanding
his own consciousness, his father was disturbed by that
and thought that was really not a good direction for his son
to go.
So his father made a special move
toward hiring many musicians and many attractive young women
dancers and young men who liked to party
and bring them all into the palace
and telling them to party like mad and play music like mad
to take his son's mind off of spirituality.
And so they were doing that in a big way.
This is the story that's told in Sanskrit.
And then, one night, they had all the music
and all the dancing and everything
and drinking whatever they drank then.
And they all got tired and fell down asleep on the floor.
It was warm, they didn't have to go to bed.
They were all crushed up.
Only the young Shakyamuni was still there.
And he looked around, and then he
walked around and looked at all of the boys and girls snoring
and sort of sprawled this way, sprawled that way.
And he says, is this what it all comes to?
And so he went down to the stables,
got his favorite horse out, rode off into the jungle,
dismounted, whacked his horse with the reins
and said go home, cut his hair off, and disappeared--
became a yogan.
So that is in this poem.
See if you can hear it.
"Walk a trail down to the Spirit Lake.
Mountain ash and elderberries red and old growth log bodies
blown about, whacked down, tumbled in the new ash wadis.
Root-mats tipped up, veiled in tall straight fireweed.
Fields of prone logs laid by the blast in line north-south,
down in silvery limbless sparklers poles.
Clear up to the alpine ridge top,
all you see is toothpicks of dead trees.
Thousands of summers.
Detritus cycle rest.
Hard and dry in the sun, the long life of the downed tree
yet to go, bedded in bushes of pearly
everlasting dense white flowers, saplings
of bushy vibrant silver fir.
And the Creek here, once called harmony falls, now gone.
The pristine mountain, just a little battered now.
That smooth dome gone, ragged crown.
The lake was shady yin.
Now, blinding water mirror of the sky.
Remembering days of fir and hemlock and sit
on a clean down log at the lake's edge, water dark as tea.
I had asked Mount St. Helens for help the day I climbed it.
Asked her, help me in this life.
So seemed she did.
The trees all lying flat like after that big party Siddhartha
went to on the night he left the house for good,
crowd of young friends swept from sexy dancing.
Dozens crashed out on the floor.
Angelic boys and girls sleeping off a palace orgy of the gods.
But what we see is the blast zone,
sprinkled with clustered white flowers.
Do not be tricked by human-centered views,
says Dogen. And Siddhartha looks it over,
slips away for another forest to really get
right down on life and death.
If you ask for help, it comes but not
in any way you'd ever know."
Thank you.
Loowit, Lawetlat'la