Wren leads the charge,
her small soldier heart.
Follow her flitting sound
into the lowest corridors
This is not a universe,
It is a garden.
Trees,
a hierarchy of halls,
halls, a universe to sing.
Follow wren’s sound
into the lowest corridors.
There,
a huge gap, fox
-made,
is where blackbirds sing.
Stone-plateaued,
Padding along among roots and stobs in shade,
I take the north-slope path to see old friends:
red huckleberry and mountain hemlock
subsisting on nurse logs amid moss; vanilla
leaf, false Solomon's seal, sword fern, bracken,
sorrel, twinflower, wild ginger, salmonberry,
maiden-hair fern, ninebark, viney maple.
They seem well; it's steep shade and deep
mouldering duff. Enough rain has alighted
upon this slope for centuries to build tall firs,
straight cedars, twisted, hoary, wrangling maples.
Yet the riverbed below seems troubled, shrunken.
Stones I never see have suddenly shown
themselves, shouldering past dried caddis cases
and empty snail shells, standing in desiccated air.
While watching forests comb those wet bellies,
All grey and louring, of the heartless clouds,
I wondered how the heavy earth breathes
Thus more than dampened, more than drowned
In so much rain. The very snails could gasp,
Nudging toward such daylight as they might,
Grudged them by the endless drops, dropping.
Fear for my crops, standing in chill pools
Or bent, prostrated, shambled, lying left and
Right, I feel, yet not enough to go and see.
There are tree branches, if I go, ready to pull
Hair, poke eyes, and shower me to my skin,
Every direction, along each path and bed.
Running streamlets ease a darkening land
All river-bound, discovering the slightest slope,
Inland being anathema to them,
A woman appears on deck.
In her shy look the sailors
Inhale the perfume of swamp roots
And certain dark streets of Marseilles.
She stands still in a shadow.
Voices of children rising from the sea,
Air bells and flowers. . . .
Or maybe she is thinking of a house,
One of those little streets in Paris
Where lovers twitter like canaries.
Or maybe it's a forest.
The leaves are hushed and still.
All this, and more, the sailors
Think of while she stands,
One hand lightly resting on the rail.
Farewell, my old pine forest!
The chariots of silver and copper —
The prows of steel and silver —
Beat the foam —
Tear at the roots of brambles.
The offshore currents,
And the huge paths of the ebbing tide,
Circle toward the east,
Toward the pillars of the forest —
Toward the timbers of the pier
Where it is bending wounded with whirlpools
of light.
As I pass through,
I may touch ash,
Hemlock, fir,
spruce, alder,
maple, cedar,
madrone, yew,
willow, dark
myrtle, but —
not you.
Outside the cabin, a smaller, child-size log cabin once sat
next to the driveway. Over the years, a coven of spiders
and wood ticks took it over, the forest slowly staking a
claim, gravity wresting it back into the ground. We never
played there. Who wants cobwebs in their hair, much less
nightmares on the brain? There were bear claw-marks in
the wood, for crying out loud. No telling how many
creatures chewed on that shack, and the fallen pine
needles on the roof left a musty Hansel and Gretel feel.
Little children could get lost in there.
Finally, someone dismantled it, the children grew up, and
the ghost stories surrounding it gradually subsided into
memories of fear we’ve almost now forgotten.
The mountain green at my right :
The sunlight yellow at my left :
The laughing winds pass between,
The river white at my left :
The flowers red at my right :
The laughing girls go between.
The clouds sail away at my right ;
The birds flap down at my left :
The laughing moon appears between.
I turned left to the dale of poem ;
I turned right to the forest of Love :
But I hurry Home by the road between.
Here, O my heart, let us burn the dear dreams that are dead,
Here in this wood let us fashion a funeral pyre
Of fallen white petals and leaves that are mellow and red,
Here let us burn them in noon's flaming torches of fire.
We are weary, my heart, we are weary, so long we have borne
The heavy loved burden of dreams that are dead, let us rest,
Let us scatter their ashes away, for a while let us mourn;
We will rest, O my heart, till the shadows are gray in the west.
But soon we must rise, O my heart, we must wander again
Into the war of the world and the strife of the throng;
Let us rise, O my heart, let us gather the dreams that remain,
We will conquer the sorrow of life with the sorrow of song.
I have come to bury Love
Beneath a tree,
In the forest tall and black
Where none can see.
I shall put no flowers at his head,
Nor stone at his feet,
For the mouth I loved so much
Was bittersweet.
I shall go no more to his grave,
For the woods are cold.
I shall gather as much of joy
As my hands can hold.
I shall stay all day in the sun
Where the wide winds blow,--
But oh, I shall cry at night
When none will know.
An old silver church in a forest
Is my love for you.
The trees around it
Are words that I have stolen from your heart.
An old silver bell, the last smile you gave,
Hangs at the top of my church.
It rings only when you come through the forest
And stand beside it.
And then, it has no need for ringing,
For your voice takes its place.
O trees, to whom the darkness is a child
Scampering in and out of your long, green beards;
O trees, to whom sunlight is a tattered pilgrim
Counting his dreams within your hermitage
And slipping down the road, in twilight robes;
O trees, whose leaves make an incense of sound
Reeling with the beat of your caught feet,
Do not mingle your tips in startled hatred,
When little men come to fell you.
These men will saw you into strips
Of pointed brooding, blind with paint,
But underneath you men will chase
The grey staccato of their lives
Down a glaring maze of walls
Much harder than your own.
And when, at last, the deep brown gaze