Devil's Club, Trail 5, British Columbia, 30 June 2017

A narrow-gauge railroad, extra narrow,
Ended near here once. The rails were torn
Out decades ago. What was left was a trail
With charm and scenery but little adventure
Or death anymore. Always possible, though,
Emily Dickinson's gentleman caller,
Omnipresent in these trees, always ready
With an inky, voluminous handkerchief
Should someone, anyone, happen to sneeze.
What a wicked disguise his beauty has been,
Not because he comes to collect, wanted
Or not, but because there was nothing
Graceful about him for all the gothic charm.
Even in the quiet afterlife of this ghost town
Once frenetic with prostitutes and miners,
Bankers, con artists, and newspaper men,
Where he was jauntier, nimbler, muscled,
Now back to being a kind of sinking whisper
In the stream, a bear shadow near a den,
Hardly substantial enough for a fetch,
Hardly worth anthropomorphizing as any
Kind of man, robed in gentle green summer,
He's the very devil hedged about with pain.

Darkest Barkshadow, Slocanada, 29 June 2017

Daughter played outside in the sunny corner
Of sloping lawn bordered by hemlocks,
One day that is, and spent another indulged
With computer games indoors. The two
Seemed to reinforce each other, however,
Elaborate nests of practiced tricks, skill sets,
In the way Daniel Dor suggests that words
And the world co-generate the technological
Dialectic of imagination, experiences not
Possible without language but not, either,
Determined exactly by it. Daughter made
Names for the fairies and doglike heroes
Of the castles and forts in the grass, names
Suggestive of formulas from game-makers
But of her own invention as well, Darkest
Barkshadow, Deleaf Roof Demok,
Spikeneedle Talit Roof, Rosetta Bark, and
Her hero, Gardener Leafneedle. Should body
Feel fraught with guilt for taking these leafy
Names down for later use, or for allowing
Hours and hours of screen time, or for
Not having daughter learning in classrooms
And piano lessons instead? "There's a little
Monster that comes out of his hole, and he's
Looking for the words," daughter said.

Last Bridge, Slocanada, 28 June 2017

After the last bridge, the gravel eroded
And the road promised a dead end soon.
A little dust hung in the air from the pick-up
That had grumbled up and roared back down.
On one side of the road, wildflowers in sun,
On the other, mosses and ferns in shadows.
Gaps in a thin line of spruce on the crest
Of a narrow ridge showed a peak with snow.
Birds made themselves heard in the trees
Despite the re-echoing wind and water. A doe
Wandered through with two fawn daughters.
The air was resin sweet where the hermit
Hunched and wondered how much longer.
The angle of the light kept shifting lower.

Four-Mile Creek, Slocanada, 27 June 2017

Any ordinary human's animal brain could do
It, didn't even need to be a human brain:
One, two, a few, a lot; one, two, and infinity.
But once arithmetic wormed its algorithms
Into the imported mind that squatted, like all
Minds, heavily on the functions of neurons,
The little link was forged to four and five,
To calendars and triangles and probabilities.
And then it was no longer so easy to jump
From one, two, maybe three distinct things
Straight into infinity. Then the mind told
The brain, quite firmly, we're both doomed,
You particularly, and self began to mourn
Itself, and suddenly the embodied brain
Began counting obsessively. All the numbers
Are against me, thought one composed
Of these and other compound thoughts,
Leaning against a hemlock trunk beside
A foaming mountain stream in summer,
Which a soft deep-woods sun lit pleasantly.
All the numbers are against me, but I can't
Quit counting and calculating them against
The odds they illustrate for me. I can't bring
Myself to throw this nonsense in the stream
Because although I know I need to stop
Counting, measuring, calculating, recounting
Everything before I can glide into infinity,
Although I know I will complete that leap
Despite me, my mind will not let go of me yet
And has not finished with me until it's left
A husk of me to seek someone else's misery.

Shallow Water, Slocanada, 26 June 2017

Naturally, the injury lingered, naturally

The world was coming to an end again.
The body that never could walk well and now
Could no longer properly swim swayed
On the double stem of bent legs, a lily
Of forgiveness offered to a cosmos
That invented sin. The sun wavered above
The ice fields and far past the atmosphere.
The way to be done with all this is to forget
The fear of the finishing, the pain, and begin.

Shelter Bay, British Columbia, 25 June 2017

A happy expectation on a sunny afternoon

Infected the line of cars, trucks, and bikes
Waiting to board the ferry to Galena Bay.
Why? Just the sun? Maybe. A hundred,
Hundred and twenty years ago, these
People, these costumes, these kinds
Of machines had never existed. This kind
Of excuse for poetry, neither. Now, we were
Here, all hands on deck, combustion engines
And smartphones, bare limbs, teeth, shades,
Faux tribal tattoos, chatting excitedly,
Our new world in this tense common as dirt
Because the past was churning under us
And the mountains in their patchwork woods
Had yet to fall down on us, although they did
Occasionally slip or burn, and what was next
Was creating us the way the big-dog diesel
Engines throbbing at our feet were creating
Our intricately braided, vanishing wake.

Revelstoke, British Columbia, 24 June 2017

Colorado kind of town. Decade ago
Had no rooms left on a summer Friday, sent
A body on to Glacier. Now an appearance
Of a place to pay for minor, essential repairs.
Cute enough. Prosperous. Peaceful. End
Of someone's world every month, at least
Every year, and many a week nonetheless.
Man with his mouth full of marbles couldn't
Have said it better, although maybe quicker.
The breeze in the tops of the conifers,
The traffic on Canada One, the summer
Students carrying music camp instruments,
The college students home on holiday
From Vancouver and Kelowna, the hunch
In the back, hunch in the parasitic mind
Having infected another brain over a screen,
A laptop or such at the Main Street Cafe.
No one will ever know what happened here,
Even if many claim it was nothing much,
Even if many, confused by breathing, forget.

Balfour Ferry, British Columbia, 23 June 2017

Kumugwe reached with blowing fingers
Up from the freshwater deeps far inland
From his usual salty haunts and loosed
One elegant copper earring from the lobe
Of a woman leaning over the ferry railing
Half praying to him. It shocked her to see
Her favorite piece of jewelry leap suicidally
Into the foaming waves. What does this
Lesson teach us about prayer and wishes?
The gods, the demons, the lords and angels,
Even the philosophical abstractions of them
Want only genuine sacrifices from us,
Things we don't want to give them, none
Of that malarkey we heap in our mythology
About why the gods want the parts we don't.
They want what we want to keep from them
And they will get it. It, us, all our loved ones.
All evening, the woman mourned her earring
So much she forgot she never got her wish.

Yasodhara Ashram, British Columbia, 22 June 2017

Half collapsed on a half-collapsed bench
Among lupines and buttercups, squirrels
Protesting each other's presence per usual
In the cedars and hemlocks behind, visitors
Such as self, but compounded of bodies,
Selves, and largely inherited minds of their
Own distinctions, wandering the trails,
A tractor and a backhoe grunting in unison
Up in the new temple under construction,
Daughter somewhere on the grounds,
In the gardens, exploring, freed from
The silence of a meditative buffet lunch,
I tried to unwind my composite awareness
As the long day passed swiftly and made,
Unmade me. Shadows and breezes, humans
Taking themselves and their beliefs seriously
As the squirrels did, what would it, what
Could it come to but more of never exactly
The same, unsocial light shining on social
Beings who felt a need to improve things?

Em Dash, K&S Railhead, British Columbia, 21 June 2017

And the Compositor said, fingers clutching
Inky slugs of lead, You will not notice this,
Will not, not this, not us, not this, you will
Not notice what you missed, this what no
Longer can be printed to exist, you will not
Dote on this, dance to this, will not dash
Dash whistle down by the banks of thistles
In the disintegrating ranks of this, notice
Not us, can't save us, can't save this, notice
This. He spun on one heel and fell in a heap,
And the moveable type flew out of his hands
And into the inky black, silver-mined stream.
You will not have, however, noticed this.

Solstice, Slocanada, 20 June 2017

One chart said sixteen hours, twenty-six
Minutes, another read sixteen hours
Eighteen minutes. Suppose it all depends
On how one measures the angle of light.
A long stretch of daylight, in any case:
Time to celebrate and consider the slow
Turn back toward more night. Little pebble,
So much vaster than us, vaster to us
Than we are to the bacteria that occupy
And harvest us, the only world we've ever
Known, where most of the sea floor alone
Is still unvisited, barely robotically explored,
And what's that even but the underside
Of a nearly two-dimensional film of water
Compared to the oblong volume of the rock
Itself, and all of this together is a pinprick
Of faintly reflected light wobbling around
One of the thousands of millions of infernos.
Body and self sat chatting with a local man
Who gets depressed each year at summer
Solstice because the light will not grow
Longer, and the man told us he planned
To drive down to Spokane next week
And visit a welding supply shop and price
Canisters of nitrogen because he and his
Partner had decided that once they became
Too old to keep living in the dark woods
Where they grow their own food and tap
A mountain stream for water and cut
Their own firewood all summer for winter,
They would like to go together quietly rather
Than molder miserably in assisted living
In town. All living is assisted, we whispered,
Self to body, body to self, under the breath.
What was it we were preparing to celebrate
Again at the hour called the sunset tonight?

Tadpole Lake, British Columbia, 19 June 2017

"Reality, as always, was narrow and dull,"
Wrote Mavis Gallant of Montreal ca. 1944,
And I suspect she didn't mean just Quebec.
Waiting for the promised parting of leaden
Skies on Father's Day, nothing doing. I spent
The day with daughter. At a cafe, the cashier
Teased her. "Shouldn't you be buying your
Father's lunch?" Daughter shrugged, smiled,
Always game for the inscrutable joking
Of adults. At six it's best to be polite
And worry about the meaning missed later.
Time drizzled through, relative as ever.
Sooner or later it will be time to go uphill,
Find the little pond where the frogs spawned
And collect the temporary tadpoles. Mavis
Gallant was not entirely wrong, but narrow
Reality is generally unreal and not entirely
Dull. The chilly air shivered with summer,
The shouts of children, the dragonfly wings.

Below the Golf Course, Slocanada, 18 June 2017

Until recently, I never thought to appeal
To some elaborate story in the future
To explain some aspect of the present.
But it's the future, invisible nonentity,
That has become the weird grab bag of gifts
And demons to stash in the carpet-bag past,
This sagging, capacious, motheaten night
Encrusted with rhinestone stars. What goes
Came from somewhen not yet and not from
What was. The changes I've yet got to get
Through will make the changes I got through
To get here. History is written by the futures.

Draft, Slocanada, 17 June 2017

The poem of the body was not an essay
Nor the assays of the mind necessarily
Poems, and yet: Consider a board game,
A ball game, a folk dance, a prayer service,
And a parliamentary debate.  Only humans
Are known to participate in any of these
Social activities, each of which is of a type
That has been humanly designed
And (continues to be) collaboratively
Developed through many, many
Instantiations, over many generations. Each
Of these activities entails conventional
Boundaries in space and time. Each is
Understood by the participants and any
Observers to stand slightly apart from
A greater, more real world external to those
Conventional boundaries, a greater world
In which the conventions of the activity
In question cannot directly be applied,
Whether that greater reality is thought of as
Nature, divinity, power, or simply whatever
Lies beyond the football pitch. Wittgenstein
Famously reasoned that there is nothing
That is held in common by every game, only
A host of family resemblances, each
Held by some games and not by others.
I disagree. Every game, including games
Of the folk-dancing, prayer-meeting, and
Parliamentary-debating types that are not
Generally considered even to be games, has
Both conventionally assigned spatiotemporal
Boundaries and a built-in assumption that
The realities (the rules) within the game
Do not obtain beyond those agreed-upon
Borders. A prayer service may put
Worshippers in direct contact with a divine,
But none of the worshippers expects divinity
To conform to the conventions of prayer
Services, nor even for those prayer-service
Conventions to hold in the worshipper's own
World outside of the service itself. Outside
My temporary window the rain pounded
Down on the woods and waves of the lake,
Although I could not help but wish, if not
Pray, to finish my thoughts another day.

Deck, Slocanada, 16 June 2017

Gusts blew twigs and branches on the deck.
The lake had rollers sounding like a sea's.
Everyone was gone. There was a hint local
Disaster had once more been, barely,
Averted, but who knew? Clouds like claws
Combed the flanks of the wooded mountains,
Bears raking the woods for edible things, even
While we waited for another thing, the one thing,
The shift that was always coming, but when?
You can't dream slowly enough for the world
To coordinate your docking procedure
With its forever receding farther shore, for
The shore to rise to you by night, but when you see
This water surging over your deck you know
You were the one was always too slow.

Desk, Slocanada, 15 Jun 2017

The day retired in milk, that summer light
Filtered through enough clouds that the day,
Long as it was, never seemed ascending
Nor declining. Daughter read about Morris
The Moose in an antiquated children's book
Printed when body was a child and self
Was something similar to self now, likely,
But long, long gone and lost to mind.
Shadowy green fell across the page. Why
Is this like that, daughter asked of the book.
Morris the Moose learned to count in a day.
Mind never learned to count in a lifetime.
Body's book on the desk read something
Like this, The components of the concept
Are still there, but they lose their status
As necessary and sufficient conditions.
Nothing called across the lake.

Mist, Slocanada, 14 June 2017

A haze settled over the narrow day. It wasn't
Planning on offering any miracles, only
The usual unusual events, news of shootings
In global capitals, burning high rises, political
Murders, terror. And away from that world
That was not the world, just an itching scab
On its back? Also the usual unusual events,
A freakishly chilly afternoon in June, the lake
Higher than in five years. Ants reconned
The cabin joints. A woodpecker hammered.
Rain muffled the distant sounds of trucks.
The more durable, stubborn sections
Of phenomena, the stones and stars, got on
With their massive tilt toward the next quake
Or black hole. The little, fritillary details
Fluttered into mist. On the shore the fallen
Logs washed down rotted and a paper wasp
Caught in the cabin window did what body
Does when it has no way to thrive, just try.

Only Robb Creek Bridge, British Columbia, 13 June 2017

Living and dying are the same
And so are singing and lying.
When things are going well, one works.
The other works when we're crying.

I knew a man who only sang
Songs for singing inside the head,
Music you'd have to imagine
Made of thoughts and hesitations.

He parked his car beside a bridge
In the middle of the mountains
Where he could listen with no one
There to have to listen to him.

He plaited the creek with phrases
He'd learned and feathered both with webs
Of recollections, fossil teeth
From beneath his own foundations,

His humming certainty what was,
That is, the creek, the breeze, the trees,
The road, the bridge, the rusted trucks,
Remained impossibly only.

Pooh Corner, Slocanada, 12 June 2017

Confinement can be madness, anyone will
Tell you, just ask the wallpaper, although
Somehow Albert Woodfox came out sane
From the other side of a genuine purgatory
Only maybe Nelson Mandela could too have
Borne unbroken. This own body could break
In a few days caught in unofficially confined
Desuetude, never mind the decomposition
Of mind likely in an actual prison. The total
Past felt nothing once destroyed, but
The smallest flicker of experiential being,
Aware in a wicker-and-compost clad world,
Could come unglued with ache of longing
To be, but to be free. You compose, said
Self, acidly, in mind of body, too freely.
I only decompose, body replied. Ravel
And unravel are near synonyms, as are
Regardless and irregardless, Beauregard.
The smell of the invalid's confinement is
The stench of life in its own nostrils,
The signal all was never well with this world.
I understand, awareness understood. When
I will be free, I will not be. As for you
And whose armies fight over this planet
No more than a speck of reflected starlight
In the irremediable night, so what? You
Want not to die or for something to die
In some way more horribly than you, true?

Small Cabin Compassed, Slocanada, 11 June 2017

What if we never left this room again?
Wondered some concatenation of familiar
Characters while daughter perished a word
Game on a screen in a wicker chair and
The long clouds descended to create
A twilight of agonizing extension over
One of the longest days of the year. Tell us
Something we don't know, sometimes,
Whispered the invisible readers, which,
Like future wealth, must've surely somehow
Already existed even though they didn't.
I can't tell you anything you don't know,
Moaned the conglomerate, unless I confess
What your language can't accept, not even
Under duress. Everything hurt, a little
At least. Then the puddle of circumstance
Pulled itself together long enough to bare
Its collective breast and breathe this: I am
That which hisses cedth ish vesperetg, thth.
The light was green and gray in the window
Of the little wooden cabin by the lake.

Notes on a Recovery Barely Begun, Slocanada, 10 June 2017

Self grew impatient with body.

How quickly can we heal? We?

Asked body in reply. What do you mean

By we? I have to do all the healing.

Hah, replied self, courtesy of the mind

Who was hosting the whole nonsense

Debate, as usual. I am the one who

Will suffer the longest for your

Falls and failings, self insisted. Body

Was having none of it. Body was sore.

Self was sore at body. Mind grew weary.

Sleep would be good for everybody,

Otherwise there would be nothing left

Except to blame the rotten board

In the dock, the owner who didn't replace

It sooner, the weather that rotted 

The dock, the inheritance that made body

Vulnerable to such falls, the crutch

That acted as a lever, pole-vaulting

Body, mind, and self, into the gravel shore.

And blaming would get no one anywhere,

As satisfying as it might be to have someone

Or something to blame, thought self. You

Would think that, thought body. I would

Think all of this and I did, said mind.

Now let's enjoy the sun on the pines.

We'll heal or we won't this time, like

Other times. We'll heal or we'll die or

Most likely we'll heal and then die.

Then mind realized it wasn't even

Pretending to have any other roles

And was just parasite talking to parasite

About the nature of things, thus, a poem.

Injured, Slocanada, 9 June 2017

The hidden pores led out of the mundane
World. Plenty of nothing lay beyond. Body
Reasserted primacy over mind and self
By falling through a rotten plank in the dock
And crushing a shoulder. Now no one moves
Who is associated with this sagging
Agglomeration of experiences and identities.
We were the world that was closing in on us.
We were the world that is.  Thunderstorms
Punctuated a day in bed when there was no
Clear path away from other storms ahead.
But something beautiful will come of this,
Self insisted as body groaned and mind said.

Sunny Afternoon, Slocanada, 8 June 2017

Wild roses flourished by the dock, pink
Blossoms with brown salamanders hiding
In the rocks and rotted flotsam logs beneath.
Silver fry schooled in the shallows, a glitter
On and in the small waves. Daughter sat
In the sun with a net. Catch, count, and
Release. Repeat. Not a boat on the lake.
Chirps and chatterboxes in the trees, but
No noise from machines. Wink in the waves.
One red squirrel scampered right over feet.
Swim out. Swim back in. Repeat. Pull fast
Through the waves. Repeat. Hold fast to the days.

Close Quarters, Slocanada, 7 June 2017

Those who thought of themselves as other
Might have suggested embracing the other,
But rarely the ones they thought of as other
Than themselves. The other was my partner,
Almost always part of me. I can't say I liked
Or embraced my other happily, although I
Often did embrace my other. Other than
That, there were the drifting logs clotting
The rising bay, preventing a clean swim,
Some evenings preventing any swim at all.
Daughter played builder of good pirate ships
By the shore, hauling out planks of flotsam,
Christening them as boats, good or evil,
Then decorating them with pollen and leaves
Before refloating them into the general
Slow-spinning armada, so that each one
Could, in imagination, fiercely fight the other.

Six-Mile Creek, Slocanada, 6 June 2017

Everything about the dirt road through
The regrown forest smirked, bears still live
Here, including a grizzly or two, plenty
Of coyotes, and an occasional cougar, too.
Timber wolves, admittedly, have not been
Seen in generations, although their genes
Are rampant in these huge coyote hybrids.
It was Robert Frost's kind of wood, dark
And puddled, old snow lingering in pockets
Until June, fast-growing young copses
Of evergreens closing in to remind you
That inhuman nature, however viciously
Hacked, waits, primed for a rapid comeback.
You are neither the master nor the innocent
Here, breezes lisp and creek tumult mutters.
You are the runaway slave of human culture,
Hungry as that rare lynx you spotted, twilight
On this very path, in a moment of startled
Glances between predatory mammals
Caught going their separate ways at dusk,
One as itself, the other possessed. The road
Was one property of a third type of appetite
Exploiting but not belonging to either of you,
That cold appetite still possessing you now,
What every poem about trees was, really,
A golden-eyed, gilt-tongued beast that now
Rules the world but will itself be eaten, soon
As its unholy back is turned and the knived
Words, inert information themselves, are left
Helpless before a resurrected green death.

Fletcher Falls, British Columbia, 5 June 2017

Everyone else had gone off on a hike. Wind
Ruffled the tender leaves of a late-blooming
Spring in the Kootenays. Parked between
Two empty vehicles, one elderly truck held
An occupant tapping at a screen in hand.
Those should be sufficient coordinates,
Reader, for you to imagine enough the time
And world in which this composition took
Place, an early summer snowflake, unique
Without being all that different from the rest,
World's classic recipe for ongoing self
Creation. It was not ever special to be unique
But to be grossly different was astonishing.
The falls roared in the embrace of the god
Some call Shiva, others call gravity. Down!
Join the rest and be crushed to my breast.
Oh, enough, body thought. I never wanted
To be one of you. I'm already too one of us.

Summerland, Slocanada, 4 June 2017

Twenty thousand days into a life, exactly,
It might have been that a specific end
Was predestined after all, given the way
The future haunted the past. The song
Good night Irene. The late night movie
On a black-and-white TV, about a drowning
In a summer lake. The years of being drawn
To that phrase, taking in the evening,
The decades longing to be in an unnamed place
Until the discovery of already being there.
Floating in a summer lake, these threaded
Through mind and body, and self took notice.
There need not be any knocking or moving
Of furniture. There might only be the waves,
Discomfiting probabilities, not comforting
Certainties that spirits remain, and the dark downward
Of the water, containing the bodies, the wreckage
To recover from depths that can't be drained.

Memorial Garden, Slocanada, 3 June 2017

Trees were planted everywhere in honor
Of the soldiers, wrote the composer
Of the never-completed stainless steel plates
To be stacked in a never-excavated vault
Underground. It was amazing, he added,
Of the memorial trees mentioned In that one
Passage of his vast composition, the hope
People invested in an immortality composed
Of something that changed only more slowly
Than their own mayfly memories of the fight.
We can't fix anything, he continued, least
Of all the lives of the soldiers, of the people
The soldiers killed, of the soldiers who killed
Them, but we try, we try, we try to make
A little something left of death more beautiful
And while away our wasting days embedding
Losses in small victories that last a little longer.
He wrote this as proof that what he wrote
He did himself, but he knew, as he sat under
A lightning-struck oak planted a century ago
In honor of a great war, what he composed
Would never be transposed in steel.

Savitr at Twilight, Slocanada, 2 June 2017

We who went away because we wished
To get something had now come back,
As the desire of all who wish to wander
Becomes home--all of us, leaving our work
Incomplete. The dead were not ghosts, only
Living people, pretending, as if to request
Of the natural world itself, whose laws,
Unlike made and actual laws, are final,
Surcease of dread. The hymns we sang
For thousands of years were tools
Of our pretending, our dreams beyond being,
In which it was never simply fear of the end
We could, perhaps uniquely, know was
Certain, but utter bafflement peering
At an obvious fact that could not be
Experienced or imagined except as bits
Of what could be, had been experienced,
Endlessly rearranged and addressed the way
We addressed each other, greetings, as if
We could understand the sun by singing to it.

Around the Lake, Slocanada, 1 June 2017

Daughter foraged for caterpillars in birches.
Rain pattered on the deck, stopped, started.
An ant explored the cabin floor. Body ached.
How would the day progress? How end?
Why ask? How to prevent self from asking?
By midday the sun was shining and one hour
Later the sky was darkening. It wasn't a fault
Of the local weather, however, that thoughts
That had always folded in on themselves,
Often in the fiction of a person, grew darker.
Back at the village, the intersections of our
Lives made the full use of time impossible.
A mind is a universe parallel to itself
But without enough tracks to run on.