Wild Roses, Tiger Swallowtails, Slocanada, 7 June 2018

At or near the rocky shore deposited
By a long-since melted glacier, creatures
Gathered and chased each other: spiders,
Butterflies, small fry in the shadows,
Larvae in their glued-together tubes of mud.
A thick golden scurf of pine pollen floated
Around bits of driftwood and hunks
Of slippery rocksnot. Wild roses bloomed.
A boy with a net searched with passion,
If not much discipline, for a real fish to catch.
Walt Whitman might have been in the grass
As he promised, himself the grass, but he
Had not changed the grass, and that aspect
Of Walt that did change the way some of us
Saw the grass along this shore this June day
Was the part of the poet that went forever
Away from all of this, never to come back.

Loam, Slocanada, 6 June 2018

Someone dumps the dirt for Wendy
Beside her open green house
Of fresh-built cedar standing boxes.
Now where did she get soil like that?
It’s as dark and thick and creamily consistent
As a mound of chocolate pudding.
A plant that can’t set roots in that
Doesn’t deserve its ancestors.
A child who jumps, bare heels first,
Into the pile comes out looking smeared
With black cake icing, delicious midnight.
The guests who get their hands in it,
Ostensibly as helpers filling garden boxes,
Look as if they’d like to lick their fingers.
Only one layer of living between them
And eating such delectably thick dirt directly
And they know it. Berries and root veggies,
Iron-rich greens and pointless flowers
Will be coaxed up, executed, and devoured
With pleasure and no small spice of pride
Soon. Soon.

Nelson, British Columbia, 5 June 2018

Pass any ordinary sedimentary deposit
And likely you are looking at hundreds
Or thousands of layers that were deposited
Seasonally, annually, under roughly
The same conditions, within roughly
The same place. The place became
The sediments deposited and then
The deposits stopped and the place became
Remains. Today in Nelson, another June,
Another fine deposit, the search for parking,
The busker on the corner, the barber shop,
The Yellow Deli, more parking searches,
The children’s toy and game store,
The pharmacy, the RCMP officer pulling
Someone else over at an intersection for
Whatever. Little deposits of memory
On top of crushed deposits of memory,
Similar to a decade of deposits of memory
Silted into seams when not washed away.
The way it changes, the way the tiniest
Differences can’t be evaded, all the same.

Nothing Doing, Slocanada, 4 June 2018

It’s amazingly difficult to live out the conviction
That one’s choices of activities are largely
Irrelevant in the long view. For most people,
Who would never sign on to such a perspective
Even in the abstract, the difficulty is all
In getting oneself to persist at whatever it is
One feels is important and noble, or at least
Acceptable and not embarrassing, to be doing.
Everything has a purpose. God works
In mysterious ways. The Earth must be saved.
Think globally. Act locally. Take out the trash.
Exercise. Donate. Read the scriptures daily.
Don’t pick your nose. Don’t overeat. Above all
Don’t waste, well, whatever it that one defines
As waste. Time. Bread crusts. Vegetable rinds.
The opportunity to be a witness for Christ,
For the forgotten Americans, for the downtrodden.
So much to waste, so many ways to waste it,
So little agreement on what is too important
To waste or not important enough to worry about.
And then there’s this oddball who is convinced
That the choice of actions, of what to waste
Or not to waste, makes little difference to change
Which makes differences all the time, which
Lays waste to everything. Against this peculiar
Conviction, the socialized, enculturated, parasitized
Human chimera fights mightily. So a day
With nothing necessary to do, no one chasing
The wasteful down for ostracism or punishment
Is in fact amazingly difficult to waste. Nothing doing.

Fish Lake, British Columbia, 3 June 2018

Back for more toads, the following year.
It is hard to overstate the weirdness
Of this, the determinedly unexpected return.
In the usual sense people mean, the end,
Yes, is nearer, but only if we agree, and we
Do not agree, that the end was always fixed
In place, with us swimming toward it
Like the tadpoles that swim into the jar.
Sometimes, we think so. Sometimes, we
Think not. Actually, that’s not right, to say
“Fixed in place.” If we can only approach
A predetermined expiration date, then that
Would be a uniquely temporal target, not
At all like a fixed destination that sits still,
Or close enough to still, while we approach
Or recede. Today that latter scenario seems
Somehow more likely. This body shimmying
These words in gelatinous lines like strings
Of eggs, full of potential but mostly to be
Squandered, felt a lot, lot closer to the end
A year ago, and now it feels a bizarre reprieve
To be here again more or less. A toad clucks
In the hand. A proof, a sure proof, that toads
Somehow, despite the depredations, sent
Fresh generations into this year’s pond.
There is no sameness, never sameness, but
There is, for them and us, a kind of continuity.

203 6th, Slocanada, 2 June 2018

One friend dropped in, distraught by a bear
That banged and leaned on her door
The night before until her tiny cabin shook.
She wanted to talk about the bear, about
Bears, but she was not ready to talk about
Bears. She took an offered book of poems
And left to buy a new bear horn at the store.
Another friend dropped in with two boys,
The boys wanting to romp with daughter.
They played outside, charging each other
And raising forts from scrap in the little yard.
Another friend dropped in during this play
And stuck her fingers in her ears and said,
“I just can’t bear kids shrieking so loudly.”
She had never had any kids, needless to say.
People who have raised children always
Pretend to be immune to their shenanigans,
Although one notices the twitching hands
And that cracking note in their voices telling
The children of others to behave, behave.
Then, one by one, everyone left. Calm
At the corner table in the sitting room, body
Considered how it felt to be struggling
With language to make it confess itself,
Which was like wrestling an angel to make it
Answer why a supernatural demon should
Serve as no more than messenger to clods,
All while being visited by this series of other
Clods trailing their own same or similar angels
Hanging like golden, floating, hungry hagfish
From each gasping neck, everyone rasping
And gesticulating in the throes of language’s
Demonic possession. A bear. A shrieking child.

Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho, 1 June 2018

Wait. The unexpected mercy, a small one,
But still to be doubly valued, for being a mercy
And for being unexpected. Consider, carefully,
Imaginary reader of these torn, partially
Dislocated phrases, how many times
Can you remember being surprised that were
Not in the form of a sudden misfortune? You see?
I’m not sharing my happy small surprise with you,
The coincidence that correlated snugly
Enough to pass for causation, that caused me,
Then, to pause in Bonner’s Ferry to get the job
Done. It doesn’t matter to these lines anyway
Why it was a mercy for old animal me. What
Matters is that you imagine, that you free
The torrent of images and language, as language
Within your own awareness as you stumble
Over this damned peculiar excuse for a song.
Think very carefully and articulate, if you please,
The moments when you turned a corner
Into such unexpected convenience you felt
Blessed. Can you lift the mist on any of your bliss?