[APPLAUSE] [SOUND OF MICROPHONE MOVING]
That's how I felt after I got hit by lightning.
Thanks for coming.
Since this is being sponsored by the Poetry Center,
I'm going to read some poetry from Arctic Heart, which
I rarely write.
I only write it on demand.
But it was interesting because I flew straight from Resolute
in the North Arctic, which is the last jumping off place
for the North Pole to London.
And the choreographer, who I'd never met,
announced to me that I had to write something
new for this ballet, and that they needed something
the next day.
And so I went to my flat, slept for a while,
got up at 5:00 in the morning, and wrote the first of these
poems.
And, basically, I wrote a poem a day on demand.
And I would go in and read the poem of the day to the dance
company and the composer, who hadn't composed
the music yet either, and David, who hadn't done the sets yet.
And they'd say, uh-huh, OK.
And they'd get up and start creating their things,
and then I would go back and write
another poem for the next day, and on it went.
But what happened was that about halfway through their movement,
I'd stay and watch what they were doing,
and their movement started influencing my words.
And so it was indeed a really true collaboration
without any ego problems.
It was a miracle of the stage, and it was really wonderful.
And we became such good friends that I moved into their house.
And Sue would say, I think I need another poem, and I'd say,
alright.
And I'd go upstairs and I'd write one,
and I would come back down in half an hour and hand it to her.
So it's kind of with a grain of salt that I read these.
And they were written to be read.
What I did was I recorded them in a studio in London,
and then the composer took those bits
and wove them in and out of the music that he composed.
And so the most horrifying thing was that the opening
night in London--
well, I'd already been struck by lightning by that time,
so I was a little, kind of, half-unconscious.
Anyway, the dance started in dark,
on a dark stage-- it was an open stage, no proscenium-- and just
in dark, and the dancers were walking out in the dark.
And this voice comes booming out of the darkness, which,
it turned out, it was my voice.
I was sitting next to the curator of the Tate museum,
and he said, oh my god.
[LAUGHTER]
I was getting lower and lower in my seat,
pretending it wasn't me.
So the whole thing was kind of crazy.
But the dancers were beautiful, and I'm not
sure about the poems.
But it should be inspiration--
I told Sue after this that--
I said, my god, Sue, you've got to live with me.
And I mean, I could write a novel in a week
if I had you telling me to write another chapter every day.
So it is good to know that some things can
be done fairly easily.
Whether they're good or not is another question.
This is called "Resolute Passage."
"Between going and coming, heat waves rise from ice.
Sun circles us.
Around and around it draws tight the strings
of halos, seal holes, entrances to the body of the earth.
Wind blows not in straight lines, but from within--
circles dissolving cycles.
There is no moon, no night, no water,
only your unexpected heat.
During the three-day storm, we melt winter down in a tin pot.
How much refilling must be done?
Is there no end to what is white inside us?
Between coming and going is more coming and going.
Space contorts me, wind drives into elbows, arm bones.
Guide my hand.
Guide my hand."
This is a more narrative poem.
I'll tell you, I went and stayed in a tent with a seal biologist
for about three weeks out on the ice.
It was about an hour and a half ride
by snowmobile from the nearest--
there's a kind of science center there.
And it was May, and so the sun was up all the time,
and it was absolutely gorgeous.
"I'm divided.
You left me in half.
You have me, have had me, have lost me,
and so I go out to see what I can see.
I sleep, and when I wake I'm living on Arctic ice a thousand
miles south of the North Pole.
The first day, three eider ducks fly by,
fly low, sewing clouds together to be my second skin.
Everything lives.
Everything has a voice.
I lie on caribou skin with a man.
The skin caresses us, talks to us.
Threads of silver light fall hard on each horizon.
Rocky islands are gray above sheltered inlets--
Resolute Passage, Allen Bay.
A storm circles low, coming from the north then swinging east,
southeast.
For days we live inside its shaking hands.
Everything talks.
The walls of the tent and the wind that talks to walls.
Caribou tell me about ringed seals
who swim under us, how sometimes one will climb into a breathing
hole and become a human child.
Everything dead talks about everything living,
and everything living billows inward,
talking to the dead in voices that sound hollow.
Between tents, a three-foot-wide crack of ice appears.
The Arctic Sea goes down 500 feet.
One day I stumble.
My leg goes in, swims away, and in the morning grows back again.
Brendan cuts a large hole in the ice
so seals can visit us in the night.
From my bed I peer down into empires of turquoise,
past walls of white to where ice ends and blue becomes
liquid darkness.
And I tell him, 'This is the eye into the universe that has gone
past its own seeing.'
The skins in the room are alive--
his caribou skin moccasins.
The whale's jawbone, resting against a house in the village,
talks ceaselessly, and polar bear skins
walk at night on ice stained red from where
they have feasted on seals.
Can there be too much breathing?
During the storm we clock wind at 45, 50, 65 knots.
Snow drives against the rhinestones of rough ice,
beveling edges, polishing stories told-- how many times?
And farther out, between grounded floes of ice,
frozen ocean melts into cerulean ponds
that walk all over the place, longing to be one with the ocean
again--
freshwater merging with salt."
Now I'll read this last one.
This one was the final piece of the ballet,
and [HIGH-PITCHED NOISE] it was done--
somebody have to go to a fire?
[LAUGHS] It was done as a solo.
I just wish you could see it.
It's much better than just the poems by themselves.
But the stage had a big blue canvas ground cover
on it and a big blue drop sheet with a huge figure
painted across--
60 feet across.
That was this human figure swimming
under ice, just floating above the dancers.
And all the lights were blue, and there
was one light that moved around and around like that, sort of
as if it were the sun.
And at the end there was this one man dancing,
and there was a painted shadow on the drop cloth,
so at the very end he just kind of leaned over into the cloth
and sort of became the shadow.
It was really gorgeous.
And this was a poem that really shows the way in which
their movement influenced me.
"You walk inside yourself on roads and ropes
of blood vessels and tendons.
You walk inside yourself and eat weather,
wearing polar bear pants and river otter
shirts the color of your hair.
You walk inside yourself and swallow bird's nests,
Arctic terns, and gulls.
You swallow storms that sprout on valves and cartilage.
In the afternoon the sky darkens,
and rain made of iron splinters deluges your limbs.
Why are you walking alone when you can't see the way?
The sea opens up, another kind of swallowing.
The kayaks laden with ghosts drift by,
ghosts that have taken on the molted flesh and fur of seals.
Here on this ephemeral ice where you
have broadcast seed and germinated,
you walk inside yourself, and a whirlwind
spins the story of a body--
how it is made, how it is unmade, how love
comes into being.
|t spins tissue and genes and desire in magnetic storms
on the sun until you have walked everywhere, seen everything.
And what is inside us is eaten, even the calm
in the whirlwind's heart, even the legs."
Gee, I like reading those so much.
Now I don't want to read anything else.
I'm going to read from an essay, the last essay
of this last book of essays called
Islands, the Universe, Home.
It's called "The Fasting Heart," which comes from a Daoist idea
that--
well, I won't explain it because it's in here, I hope.
Anyway, it's this idea of a heart so full of--
I mean, the fullness of the heart is also a kind of fasting.
"February 28.
Again and again winter's brightness
reveals possibilities, yet I drive its cold spine
into my back and lose all feeling.
In December I watched the sun lower itself to the horizon
and saw how snowbanks rose up to it like a wave far out at sea,
growing bigger as it pushed for shore.
A shadow passes over the place where I know the lake to be.
The lake is a white flat, featureless,
with fenders of snow bending up into the night.
Above me, mountains walk in clouds, are made of clouds.
Beneath, hidden lake ice moans--
Oh, darling, what are you saying to me?
The fasting heart knows hunger but is denied.
It breaks and is set wrong--
the leg that walks crooked must be broken again to go straight.
Emptiness fills the heart until it bursts,
and the salt water pouring out is
a cord on which disparate elements are a ribbon of chaos.
Looking around me, I see presages of spring.
Willow branches are bumpy with tight buds,
and melting flecks of frost in dirt are lights going out.
Yet more snow comes, deep and soft.
On the mountain there are tracks made
by elk, narrow trails pounded deep into scree.
I ski to the gate at the top of the mountain--
a gate that leads nowhere--
and remember how in spring wind swings
it open and closed as if all snow came
onto the earth this way and by the same route was fanned away.
Lately I've had to redefine the word 'knowledge' to a knowledge
that cannot know anything.
I'm dealing not in careless absurdities here
but in the way material reality is unobservable
and implicit order can be found in paradox.
Perhaps despair is the only human sin.
Who am I to feel disappointment?
Is a bird disappointed in the sky?
I read Lao Tzu--
'Concentrate your will.
Hear not with your ears but with your mind, not with your mind
but with your spirit.
Let your hearing stop with the ears,
and let your mind stop with its images.
Let your spirit, however, be like a blank,
passively responsive to externals.
In such openness, only can Dao abide.
And that openness is the fasting of the heart.'
To fast does not mean to go without but to become empty
and in so doing open oneself.
I am at the beginning of a new month, and spring is here.
Snow comes when there is sun.
Sun shines, but I can see my breath.
When the shadow finally slides from the hidden lake,
I try not to long for open water but to see
how light and darkness makes sense of these days, how
it separates planes of thought and gives distinction
to landscape.
I spend the night on my tiny island, Alcatraz,
and watch the morning star and the dark side of the planet
go bright.
Then a light snow falls and steam from the earth
rises into it, coming back down as a shroud.
It was on an island in the North Sea
that Werner Heisenberg, recovering
from a bout of hay fever, formulated the first quantum
theory.
Strolling those desolate northern beaches,
he recalled that his conversations in student days
with Niels Bohr and understood that the world, in all
its diversity, is made of a single substance-- quantum
stuff, whose variety is manifested
not as substance but as process, not in palpable form
but in the way it moves.
It's March.
I don't know the date.
Tonight during a full moon, I watch a bank of clouds
break off from a mountaintop and feel something break in me.
Each thought brings forth a new world, and in this way,
consciousness creates experience.
Thoughts walk, new worlds are lost,
and the losing brings forth another ephemeral continent,
motion giving birth to motion.
In the morning I walk to the falls,
taking notes on the erotic positions of winter-killed deer.
'Even in death--' my journal begins,
though it is not about sex that I write but about how the body
itself is a complete truth.
Why, then, does life seem embellished with sadness?
I fight against the optical illusion of separateness.
Quantum physics tells me the experience of isolation
is a fantasy, that I am part of a whole.
Yet my heart literally hurts, saying these things."
This is a really long essay, so I read parts of it.
"I wait for light, and when it comes the lake is mine again.
It is a black shield, a silver mirror,
a black cloth wound around glinting mountains.
Ducks waddle on a free-floating piece of ice
that bumps into the island.
Golden eagles colonize the sky.
One area of open water in the lake is shaped like a violin.
Wind plays water pizzicato, a la Bartok, plucking strings.
At the shallow end, gray mud flats
are marked with holes where snipes have thrust
their sensitive bills for food.
By the end of the week, sun has shrunken lake ice
to the size of a dime.
On the evening news, Carl Sagan talks about the photographs
from the Voyager.
He sounds distraught-- 'There doesn't seem to be any life out
there,' he reports, 'which underscores the rarity
and preciousness of life here.'
One photograph has moved him.
It looks back at the earth from the edge of the galaxy.
He says, 'We look like a blue dot.
A blue dot-- that's all we are.'
At dusk I gaze across the lake.
My little island, Alcatraz, is a floating hyacinth
in rising water, dragging willow branches like oars.
Purple swallows dive down for mosquitoes,
and the iridescent heads of mallards flash back and forth.
Inside a nest hung by pink straps made from willow bark,
I see a blue dot.
A universe within a universe-- the blue egg of a robin.
April 20."
This is especially for Gary Nabhan,
who I think is still here, who I went on a little trip with.
"White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.
Here I am at ground zero, my fingers
stuck through the chain link fence
that surrounds Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was
detonated on July 16, 1945.
This place stands for what could be the end of all life,
yet spring is in full bloom, and I'm here
with the botanist and writer Gary Nabhan,
looking for an uncommon cactus which survives
by giving up its best defense--
sharp spines.
Also called grama grass cactus or papery spine cactus,
it has soft and elongated spines, a camouflage to make it
look like the grama grass in whose midst it grows.
Redtailed B-17s fly hot missions over us, low and fast,
dropping bombs near Stallion's Gate to the north
as we crawl over radioactive ground.
'It took a year to get permission to come onto this
land,' Gary yells over the roar of bombers.
At the main gate we were fingerprinted, photographed,
given badges, and sent off with an Army biologist named Kim.
'Don't touch any ordnance,' she warns us as we search fairy
rings of grama grass for the cactus.
We are in the supersecret zone where laser explosives are
set off to duplicate nuclear detonations
and Patriot missiles are fired.
Everywhere, pieces and parts of bombs, shells, nose cones,
and airplanes stick out of the sand.
'Some things might still be hot,' Kim says.
'You know, unexploded.'
I keep expecting to find grotesquely enlarged plant
specimens, but everything looks quite normal.
At my elbow, a phosphorescent beetle with a turquoise
back crawls over an unexploded shell,
then makes tracks away from me in the sand.
Semis go by with full-grown pine trees, held upright
in giant Christmas tree stands.
The Army is the greatest producer of theater.
'What are they doing?' we ask.
'They're making a simulated forest to practice night bombing
raids,' we are told."
I mean really, they were.
Nothing was too big for them.
"A turkey vulture circles us, and an oryx--
imported from Africa for fat-cat officers to hunt--
looks on as we begin to find and flag toumeya."
That's the name of the cactus.
"Looking down into a clump of grama grass,
we find it almost impossible to see
the cactus, whose papery spines flow out like blond hair.
Conformity and camouflage are two ways
plants and humans can get along in the world.
They can also be a way to hide the means of war.
To live in conflict and harmony.
In the morning we are barred entry to the missile range.
During the night they bombed the 'forest,' and now they are
shooting off missiles that land where, yesterday,
we found cactus, so we retreat to non-military lands.
A skiff of new snow shines on Sierra Blanca Peak to the north,
and to the south, a blimplike object is suspended in the sky,
which I'm told is the border patrol's 'look-down-radar' for
drug detection.
As we set up 10-by-10-foot transects where toumeya is
particularly thick, a mockingbird mimics the sound
of a phone ringing, then a bomber zooming overhead.
We stop to look at a king-sized yucca tree.
One species of moth lays its eggs
inside the ovary of the yucca flower,
showering pollen onto the stigma as it does so,
inadvertently pollinating the plant.
When the eggs develop, the larvae feed on yucca seeds,
leaving enough for the plant to reseed itself.
A classic example of botanical love--
the plant unable to live without the animal, and vice versa.
On another road we examine a buffalo gourd,
so precisely adapted to the desert's short rainy season
that it can emerge from dormancy to flower in just 20 days.
The plant is pollinated by an unusual bee
whose body is shaped perfectly to fit inside the male flower.
The bee goes there to sleep at night and backs out at dawn,
carrying pollen grains on its back
as it visits the female flower.
Two by two, F-15s make their morning assaults on my ears
as I crawl on hands and knees through stands
of cactus endangered by its defenselessness
and think how cooperation and competition can
be the same thing, two sides of the same coin.
At midmorning I find a robust, two-headed toumeya, the biggest
one so far.
Head propped on my hand, I memorize the cactus's form
and shape and listen to the mockingbird sing obsessively--
one song after another--
and wonder what makes any song one's own.
Then it occurs to me that this cactus's best
defense is a peaceful one--
not meting out pain but merely blending in.
Conclusions end in new questions.
Why would a cactus live in the middle of grasses
that are routinely grazed?
Have I missed the obvious?
Perhaps the point is to be eaten,
so the ingested seeds can be distributed through the manure
of the grazing animal.
The lesson here is implicit.
Some things die in order to survive--
individual sacrifice for the greater, common good.
But isn't that what they tell young soldiers going to war?
More F-15s streak by, and another mock forest
has been created and destroyed.
Here, on the missile range, death
is thought to have the power to end things.
But that truth is incomplete.
There is also this--
the origin of life is always found in death.
Death is life's constant companion.
Home again."
Home meaning Wyoming.
"It's almost May, and I climb the dry bed of Cedar Creek,
looking for meltwater.
Scrambling up boulders, down steep sides, over fallen trees,
I finally come to a grotto.
Pine wind drives into it, scouring its walls as though
readying it for spring.
Bird song reports against walls in sharp echoes.
Looking upcanyon, I see towering peaks trimmed in snow--
our storehouse of water.
At the mouth of the grotto I touch my toe
to a pool covered with ice--
delicate as eggshell, it splinters.
I dreamed last night of three waterfalls whose flow had
been transfixed as crystal bowls that wouldn't stop breaking--
then, falling, they became whole again.
A long icicle at the front of the cave drips--
the tick of a heart.
The word 'grotto' comes in a roundabout way from crypta,
meaning 'hidden' or 'to hide,' and is related to an old Norse
word that means 'pile of stones.'
Two huge, whalelike boulders lean out from the gorge,
cantilevered over my head, and where they split apart is wedged
a single, egg-shaped rock, glazed over with ice,
a transparent cocoon inside of which stirs an unborn being--
a bug, a whale, a bird.
We turn our cattle out onto the range.
Thousands of acres are split into temporary hundred-acre
pastures by the use of electric fences, and we move the cattle,
sheep, and one guard donkey through these quickly--
depending on the growth rate of the grass,
it's about every three days--
in order to avoid overgrazing and damage
to the whole ecosystem.
Short-duration, high-intensity grazing
duplicates the movement of buffalo
pursued by predators-- human and animal-- over these lands.
For protection they bunched up, trampled ground, grazed,
then quickly moved on.
In this way, few, if any, grass plants
were bitten off more than once.
Now I'm on my hands and knees again,
regarding a blade of grass, not only to see myself
in it, as Whitman did, but to understand what a grass
plant needs to nourish it.
It should be grazed once, and the root systems
left to restore themselves.
It needs to be fertilized by the animals who
use it and watered by rains.
In Japan I visited the Daoist farmer Fukuoka,
who said, 'In order to restore the balance
of the natural world, we have to change our attitudes.
We have to learn to do less.
People plant with their heads.
They think they have to do many things, but they are wrong.
It's the kamisama who do the growing--
we just help out a little bit.
We must stop thinking we know anything.
Better to take our clothes off and roll around
on the ground like babies.
We have to give up everything before we can begin.'"
I often took his advice on the ranch.
When I was really tired and fed up
and everything had gone wrong, I'd say, oh, well
Fukuoka said I could just take my clothes off and roll around
like a baby.
So it's a good thing to remember when things get bad.
"As we walked to his hillside farm,
bird song erupted and a wild tangle of vegetation
took over from neatly pruned farms below.
Cucumber vines climbed persimmon trees.
Peaches dropped into winter gardens
of scallions, cabbage, daikon.
Narcissus bloomed around mandarin orange trees
whose unpicked fruit was split open and eaten by birds.
'If they like it, it must be good,' Fukuoka exclaimed
happily.
He grows rice as it's meant to be grown--
like any wild grain, started from seed,
sprouting in soil, not water.
'Why do people think they have to plant rice any other way?
They must be crazy!
So much work.
The kamisama laugh at us.
Really, things are very simple.'
I try to cultivate my thinking and manage
the land for biodiversity.
Let one good thing happen, and there are many results.
Stop overgrazing, and more plants--
grasses, wildflowers, shrubs, trees--
cover the ground and more species occur.
As a result there are more bugs, more birds,
more small and large animals, a better energy and mineral cycle.
Intermittent streams begin to flow year round.
In a few years' time there is more of everything,
and these open spaces begin to fill with life.
May.
High water.
One stream comes down, then another,
until meltwater pours from every direction onto the ranch.
There are creeks where none existed before,
and the front yard is a wide pool buzzing with mosquitoes.
Bird song rolls over tumbling cataracts,
falling into the catcher's mitt of the human ear.
Snow is gone.
If snow represents renunciation, then I renounce renunciation.
By afternoon a snake dance of red silt stains
running water, and drinking it, I
feel red threads pull through me, the red threads of desire.
Mornings and evenings I irrigate a hundred acres,
setting dams in ditches to stop the flow of the creek
and divert it onto fields of native hay.
Standing kneedeep in water, I recklessly
declare this to be the end of the drought.
Fields that have been dry for three years are inundated,
water working its way around hard stems like an embrace.
How good it must feel to drink with the whole body.
At the end of the day a bird, hidden from sight,
sings a song I've never heard before.
A front comes in.
I ride to the mountaintop gate--
the gate that leads nowhere--
and watch shifting mists hide running herds of elk.
Truncated rainbows stab the green slope.
Rain comes as an act of generosity,
as if the sky's big body had pulled
itself apart for me to see.
I go back to the grotto on Cedar Creek.
Moss climbs the walls, and little ferns poised
on rock ledges receive spray.
Way back in the crypt, a pool has formed,
and water dripping out of a seam in the rocks
feeds it continuously.
I walk through the waterfall-- hair
and clothes drenched-- and, on the other side,
crouch down under sloping walls.
Shoes off, I put my toe into the pool--
silt rises in plumes, hiding me.
June.
Flowers from the apple tree falls,
and I feel the bulbs at the end of branches swelling into fruit.
Clouds of yellow pine pollen billow past.
Now the gate on the mountain is sun-whitened
against a black sky, and the island in the lake
is a brain studying itself, not only remembering
remembering but knowing how the remembering takes place.
Receptors exposed, everything ordinary
turns into an exotic apercu.
I saddle my young horse, ride out onto a field,
and ask him to stand quietly.
This he will not do.
Instead we take the pilgrim's loop--
from lake to grotto, grotto to tablets, tablets to lake.
Now the gate that leads nowhere is black,
and the mountains behind it are white with unseasonal snow.
When we trot home, a cloud throws huge hailstones
like miniature comets to the ground,
as if my uncertainty had become a form of gravitational pull.
The fasting heart slides from extreme to extreme,
looking for quiescence, longing for longing to be assuaged.
To fast means to put nothing in the body.
It also means leaving nothing out.
Is that why I keep breaking into myself like a thief,
not stealing but filling up on hope and fear?
Borrowing a stethoscope from the vet's kit,
I listen to my own heart.
Its beats are slow and fast, sure and unsure, arrhythmical
and steady-state.
Again and again, during the long summer,
it is knocked open by a flicker's drumming love tap,
and the skin that covers tissue is pecked away.
Sometimes I wonder if the fasting heart is not
another term for gluttony.
At dawn in a friend's hillside house,
I hear a grove of bamboo rustle, and from it
the world's smallest bird, the hummingbird,
flies into the room, spinning around and around
as if trying to show me how to draw the outlines of self
bigger.
What I'm talking about is not illusions of grandeur
but how, in emptiness, I could become more inclusive,
evolving in the direction of generosity,
a world in which one thing never precludes another.
Later a fan spills cool air across my back,
and because I'm feeling sad, my friend
feeds me delicacies between gulps of wine.
I think of a small culvert on the ranch that connects one
irrigation ditch to another--
how during high water it fills at one end and overflows
at the other, so that filling and emptying
become the same thing.
August.
I'm camped with friends in Yellowstone Meadows,
a 10-hour ride horseback through timbered mountains where,
two years ago at this time, fires burned hot.
This year the meadows are a wild garden
thick with flowers, walled by the volcanic arms
of the Yellowstone caldera.
Clouds of mosquitoes rise with clouds of pollen.
Early every morning I go for a walk, bear bell
banging against my thigh.
A stand of trees to my left is all black trunks
crowned with the gray hair of charred needles and branches.
On the ground, where willows burned hot,
circles of tall grass have appeared, their inflorescence
like lace between my legs as I walk.
Who is embracing me?
Not far from its source below Younts Peak,
the Yellowstone River is still narrow.
It moves like glass, bends at oxbows,
melts into one transparency laminated
onto another as if to show me how true wealth should look.
The meadow is bombastic, a thick, bright mass
of grasses, forbs, and shrubs--
fescue, blue bunch, timothy, sedge, yarrow, elk thistle,
and cinquefoil, all punctuated with wildflowers
of every shape--
paintbrush, gentian, elephant-head, blue penstemon,
just to name a few, and the strange western coneflower
with its dark center and no petals, as if, like a monk,
it had shaved its head.
Pairs of sandhill cranes waddle in front
of me eating grasshoppers, then fly up,
landing a little farther ahead.
Every reed-lined pool is home to families of ducks--
mothers and ducklings and protective, busybody drakes.
In the larger ponds, the beavers' dome houses
look like pavilions with pond water as a moat.
To have been made one of the animals and to live here--
how envious I am.
Morning.
Mist on the river--" Remembering the fire makes me thirsty.
"Mist on the river.
Two moose grazing across the meadow, smooth as water moving.
A raft of pink clouds rises over the mountain like a wing,
then sandhill cranes fly up, their bodies the color
of the sky before first light.
Carew!
Their cries so deep they sound like bells echoing off
basaltic rock, carried back across moving water.
What is this wild embrace, this slipping away of heat
from air at daybreak, these clothes made of bird cries being
peeled from my body?
Who is holding me?
Why do your arms keep sliding down my back and hips,
then start again at my face?
What is in my throat?
What have I said or swallowed?
Is it foam from the river where it collides with point bars
and cut banks, or the rolling Rs of sandhill cranes?
Lao Tzu exhorts us to listen to the world
not with ears, but with mind--
not with mind, but with spirit.
Some days I hear what sounds like breathing,
quick inhalations from the grass, from burnt trees,
from streaming clouds, as if desire were finally
being answered.
And at night, in my sleep, I can feel black tree branches
pressing against me, their long needles combing my hair.
Later, when the man I love holds me,
I'm astonished that such an intense feeling
could come from the embrace of only one body and two hands.
Late August.
North of the ranch, I walk to stone tablets
that rise 300 feet from a steep mountain slope.
At midday they throw pointed shadows
like black teeth down to me, and I climb them,
slipping on rotted granite and scree.
Wind-pruned shrubs punctuate the slope.
Like a bear or a bird, I quench my thirst eating rose hips
along the way.
Then I'm at the base of the outcrop
and have to tilt my head all the way back
to contemplate these monoliths.
Setlike false fronts, burned in the back, a sheer drop
on the side that faces the world,
they are the twin bulletin boards
for the cosmos, a tabula rasa that has pushed up
from under the ground.
One eroded rock looks like a pushpin.
Is this the spindle on which the tablets
swivel, revealing secret rooms?
Are there messages pinned to the rock, ones I can't read?
Small pine cones litter the ground
where I'm standing, though there are no trees.
Who throws them here, and from where?
The tablets are limestone, sedimentary rock deposited like
icing on top of two-billion-year-old granite
by the coming and going of shallow seas.
In a time of geologic violence, the granitic basement
rose and tipped, so that the sedimentary layer faces
outward in vertical flatirons.
The more fragile shales and mudstones
broke away at this point, leaving
much of the limestone tablets exposed.
Rock that breaks when stressed is called, by geologists,
'competent' rock, and those that bend under stress 'incompetent.'
On the scale between competent and incompetent,
limestone falls somewhere in the middle.
The tablet surface is milky.
I am told it is calcium carbonate secreted
by algae and corals.
Here and there chunks of maroon chert
show through, a fossil record of those tiny organisms
that lived and died at the bottom of the sea.
Making my way along the base of the tablets,
I come on a tiny cave--
an outdoor tokonoma, or a place where a saint or a hermit
might have been installed.
White-throated swifts start out from nests,
built-in rock niches, and soar over the valley,
diving for insects--
their sole food.
If a sudden freeze hits, as it can any time in August,
these birds can go 12 days without eating, losing
60% of their body weight in the process.
Is this the kind of fast my heart must take on?
Now the sky above me fills with birds.
Ravens zigzag through false fronts, then
birds I can't identify fly out in slow-moving pairs.
I glass them with binoculars.
Is it possible these are pigeons?
What are white-banded pigeons doing up here?
Rain clouds come.
The sound of North Beaver Creek crescendos and softens
in tidal winds, and the narrow edge of these stone shoulders
take on gold at the end of the day.
As clouds spread white across the sky,
then drip not with rain, but with milk,
I think it must be pigeons' crop milk sputtering down,
a wondrous substance belched up from the esophagus which has
more protein than mother's milk or a cow's.
Inching my way along the base, I stand with my nose to rock.
Here, they are an open book to me, my feet toed into the spine.
Fingering the jagged edge of the fracture between the two halves,
I wonder if a page has been torn out.
Tabula rasa-- is there a codex inscribed here?
And if so, how can a blank be deciphered?
Or is it a song too old to have words?
The rock is pink, white, green, sand, nubby, and frosted.
When no one is looking, I lick it and taste salt and milk.
Time for a nap."
We're getting to the end here, don't worry.
I'm not going totally crazy.
"Time for a nap.
Downslope under a many-armed Engelmann's spruce.
Dreams wing through my head like swifts,
fast and sure, but gone in an instant.
The sound of the sea and rivers running into the sea
is continuous.
Here, on the ocean floor, brain coral and red sea stars thrive.
Vents let out juvenile water in warm streams
where bacteria and tiny organisms live.
Finally, the tablets are laid to rest and lie flat.
I walk on them--
they are a foundation for a great house, or else I dance,
and they are a table.
Awake or asleep?
I don't know which.
My gaze drops far below to the lake--
a blue dot, as Carl Sagan says, nothing more,
yet it mirrors these tablets and this mountain.
For a moment the lake looks like stone and the tablets are water,
then I am somewhere inside the earth
and the tablets are standing in water.
I dive under them.
Bubbles rise to the surface from the corner of my mouth as words.
It's hot where I am, and the water is red.
The tablets are anchored to the earth's molten mantle
with long roots, red threads--
they are teeth hung to white bone.
A song comes my way.
Who is singing?
Warm and cold currents carry the tune.
A friend says, 'Give up your mansion of sorrow--
I am taking it down stick by stick.'
Hands joined one on top of the other, like a calf's at birth,
I dive but go upward.
There is no Dantean tunnel with light at the end,
no river of light in which to paddle,
only brightness narrowing to infinity.
I feel as if I had broken ribs--
so hard to catch my breath.
A sharp, bitter breeze takes me by the wrists.
Pale clouds unfold, revealing flesh within flesh.
Then the sky stops, but the mountain moves like a river.
The 13th-century Buddhist Dogen wrote,
'Walking beyond and walking within are both done on water.'
One definition of walking is to unbalance oneself
by throwing a--
[AUDIO OUT] Dogen says, 'Water is the only truth of water.
Water is water's complete virtue.'
I feel hands on my body.
What kind of embrace is this?
Everything aches.
Blood stings as it pumps through,
contorted rib bones squeeze breathing.
Leaning back against the tablets is like leaning into water.
Where do I break off, and where does water begin?
At the end of the day, a pigeon flutters
around my head, dribbling crop milk into my mouth, delicious.
Then, pitching out over the precipice,
I pass beyond this rock-studded mountain.
So much has broken away already.
There is nothing to drink but air,
nothing left to walk on but water--
yet the fasting heart grows full."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]