Five mourning doves gather on close branches.
But the sky in the trees is too miserable for mourning.
Even the earth will not accept the night’s snow
which sits in clumps on the ground like oil on water.
It highlights fallen trees on the mountain slope
showing all the directions down can take you.
Between the shed and a crack in the clouds
two bluejays mate in a flurry on a fallen ladder.
At night when my heart sets out to find you
my weakness follows clumsily waving a lamp
behind me casting shadows making still things
seem to move and moving things
impossible to identify: I don’t spend much time
with my weakness but it finds me easily enough
I don’t talk much about it or even look at it
straight on though when it speaks its volumes
increase when it is seen it is familiar
I know I cannot shake this thing which is not a thing
but like the part of our bodies we cannot see
When I see that part through others it wears my face
Sometimes the present is the bird of prey: on the long morning highway towards work, I see half a mile ahead of me a steady migration of cars from the left lane to the right. This often happens when a driver becomes preoccupied with something other than driving; there’s an equation somewhere for this coefficient of attention and the resulting diminished pressure on the one’s acceleration across this moment of paved lane, and the next thing you know there are cars streaming by to the right, some drivers keeping their eyes straight ahead knowing that they are breaking road protocol by passing on the right, some pausing to stare at the offending driver before gunning past them. Because on a two-lane road winding through the foothills and with as many trucks as vultures settling on the occasional and equally inattentive deer, such behavior is considered rude and is answered in kind, namely by this stream of cars passing on the right while the offender is trapped in the wrong lane, unable to adjust their location to the speed they are going, while a long line of angry and virtually late commuters drifts by. Because to the one being passed, it’s not like someone going eighty miles an hour, it’s like people walking by you who are simply walking faster than you and have no idea why you are walking so slowly. It takes time to be passed when trapped in the left lane. This morning (though who knows what morning it will be when you read this, maybe one in which you have sped by someone yourself) I follow my basic rules of the road—never be the fastest or slowest on the road, never give the person behind you a chance to ruin your day, never do the same the person in front of you. From the left lane I stay in queue and glide into the right lane behind the car ahead of me, and pass this slow car like every other vehicle is doing. In that comfortable slipstream I glance back into my side rear-view and for just an instant see the distraught expression of the driver—she is old, she is driving a little over the speed limit, she is caught in this pocket of wrong lane by things happening too fast for her to keep up with, and by people who will not let her move over. She’s not doing anything wrong! All this I read in a half-second’s reflection through a windshield coated with morning sun’s glare. I feel like it is her mind that is glaring off the windshield, not the sun. It is blinding in its clarity. I want to take my foot off the pedal, let her pass me and take up a position back in the left lane, behind her car, to shield her from the assault of everyone trying to get to the future faster. Is this not the trip my own mother takes each day, alone in a vessel already traveling too fast but not fast enough to catch up to the past or avoid the future? But it’s too late, the driver in a pickup truck behind me is already pushing me forward, and the car behind him, so I tap on the pedal to speed up further, and when I look back again the windshield is dark in the diminishing image in my mirror. And I’m no mind-reader; I’m just another driver passing by, part of the unremitting assault of the present.
All at once dogs and children roam in friendly agitation
where yesterday they stuck to the plowed paths
They climb the mountain of last week’s snow pushed to the roadside
Its ten thousand questions answered
by the lengthening silence of the afternoon
I feel like calling you every hour just to say nothing special
With thunder and warm wind spring starts to shoulder winter aside
Under sky’s sharp azure stone a jeweled cloud leapfrogs mountain
There is the right way
[insert memory here, L]:
(there is this way, too)
A fair game of balance:
(do not respect the syllables)
a life is in your hands
See Indigenous Metropolitan’s original post here.
Your boots by the bed
that song as I slid them off
the world is humming
A cloud shadow crawls across the bare mountainside
touching every tree. Small clouds seep and spread
along the ground like water, large clouds drop
heavily like whole trees being painted suddenly black.
One, then another, backlit by the trees still in light.
Funny to think of something bigger than a mountain
pouring over a mountain, its own peaks in constant change
enveloping what seems so changeless
but is really two images in today’s mirror.
Funny to see how quickly it spreads then leaves,
like something huge suddenly not remembered.
Yet it was there. Pushed by the invisible hill of wind
And over on this peak the sign of an old inn groans
and the paper darkens beneath my pen.
[by my daughter Sophia]
Turtle walks around.
The forest is lined with trees.
–who made that footprint?
The Goddess is fierce.
She never compromises–
in wisdom she waits.
Translations from the English 