The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems

  I drove down a road of enormous houses

  that encompass many toilets. Down hallways,

  leaping left or right, you can crap at will.

  A mile away a dead Mexican child slept

  out in the desert on the wrong side of a mattress.

  17

  Up at the Hard Luck Ranch

  there’s a pyracantha bush full of red berries

  right outside my study window.

  In December after seven hard frosts

  the birds arrive to eat the fermented berries.

  The birds get drunk and unwary in this saloon

  and the barn cats have a bird feast.

  A phainopepla landed on my head, shrieking

  when my eyebrow moved, booze on its bird breath.

  18

  My zabuton doubles as a dog bed. Rose sleeps

  there, full to the fur with mu. Glanced in

  on a moonlit night; her slight white figure coiled

  on the green cushion, shaking with quail dreams.

  Sensing me, an eye opens, single tail-wag. Back to sleep.

  When she’s awake, she’s so awake I’m ashamed

  of my own warm water dance, my sitting too long at the fire.

  19

  Time gets foreshortened late at night.

  Jesus died a few days ago, my father

  and sister just before lunch. At dawn

  I fished, then hoed corn. Married at midmorning,

  wept for a second. We were poor momentarily

  for a decade. Within a few minutes I made

  a round trip to Paris. I drank and ate during a parade

  in my room. One blink, Red Mountain’s still there.

  20

  More lion prints in our creek bed.

  Right now in the light cool rain at midnight,

  coyotes. Skunk stink laden in the mist.

  Hidden moon, I don’t want to go home yet.

  Older, the flavors of earth are more delicious.

  21

  Just like today eternity is accomplished

  in split seconds. I read that Old Nieh

  in the wilderness vastness trained a mountain

  tiger to carry his firewood. A black hole the size

  of 300 billion suns is gobbling up the M87

  galaxy because astronomers gave it a boring name.

  Time passed in sitting begs mercy from the clock.

  22

  Out in an oak-lined field down the road

  I again saw time, trotting in circles

  around the far edges. The dog didn’t notice

  though she’s usually more attentive. She lost

  the Christmas watch I gave her

  in a mountain canyon at the edge of earth.

  23

  It certainly wasn’t fish who discovered water

  or birds the air. Men built houses in part

  out of embarrassment by the stars

  and raised their children on trivialities

  because they had butchered the god within themselves.

  The politician standing on the church steps thrives

  within the grandeur of this stupidity,

  a burnt-out lamp who never imagined the sun.

  24

  The monk is eighty-seven. There’s no fat

  left on his feet to defend against stones.

  He forgot his hat, larger in recent years.

  By a creek he sees a woman he saw fifty summers

  before, somehow still a girl to him. Once again his hands

  tremble when she gives him a tin cup of water.

  25

  Talked to the God of Hosts about the Native American

  situation and he said everything’s a matter of time,

  that though it’s small comfort the ghosts have already

  nearly destroyed us with the ugliness we’ve become,

  that in a few hidden glades in North America

  half-human bears still dance in imperfect circles.

  26

  This adobe is no protection against the flossy

  sweep of stars that in recent nights burn pinprick

  holes in my skin, mostly in the skull despite my orange

  stocking cap, hunter’s orange so you won’t get shot

  by other hunters, a color the stars readily ignore

  with beams of white fire. O stars, you forsaken suns.

  27

  I confess that here and there in my life

  there is a vision of a great brown toad

  leaking words of love and doom through his skin,

  excrescences that would kill anyone, given time,

  his words tinged as they are with the shapes

  of death, one drumbeat, a heartbeat, the skins

  of gods a rug spread beneath our feet.

  28

  Lin-chi says, having thrown away your head so long

  ago, you go on and on looking for it in the wrong

  places. The head’s future can be studied in a spadeful

  of dirt. The delightful girl I loved 40 years back

  now weighs, according to necrologists, 30 lbs. net.

  Why does she still swim in the eddy in the river’s bend?

  29

  The four seasons, the ten oaths, the nine colors, three vowels

  that stretch forth their paltry hands to the seven flavors

  and the one money, the official parody of prayer.

  Up on this mountain, stumbling on talus, on the north face

  there is snow, and on the south, buds of pink flowers.

  30

  It is difficult to imagine the wordless conversations

  between Jesus and Buddha going on this very moment.

  These androgynous blood brothers demand our imagination.

  They could ask Shakespeare and Mozart to write words

  and music, and perhaps a dozen others, but they’ve done so.

  The vast asteroid on its way toward LA goes unmentioned.

  31

  Come down to earth! Get your head out of your ass!

  Get your head out of the clouds! Stop mooning around!

  Pay attention. Get to work on time.

  Time and tide that wait for no man willingly

  pause for the barearmed girl brushing her hair

  in a brown pickup truck on a summer evening.

  32

  If that bald head gets you closer to Buddha

  try chemotherapy. Your hair drops casually to the floor,

  eyes widen until the skull aches, the heart beats like

  Thumper’s foot. Heaven’s near at every second.

  Now you’ve become that lamb you refused to eat.

  33

  I haven’t accepted the fact that I’ll never understand

  the universe that I saw clearly for the first time

  from our roof at nineteen in miniature kensho.

  We belonged to each other. Love at first sight,

  notwithstanding the child who stared in fear

  at the northern lights and noted the Milky Way’s convulsive

  drift. A lone star perched on the mountain’s

  saddle now brings tears of doubt.

  34

  It wasn’t until the sixth century that the Christians

  decided animals weren’t part of the kingdom of heaven.

  Hoof, wing, and paw can’t put money in the collection plate.

  These lunatic shit-brained fools excluded our beloved creatures.

  Theologians and accountants, the same thing really, join

  evangelists on television, shadowy as viruses.

  35

  Everywhere I go I study the scars on earth’s face,

  including rivers and lakes. I’m not playing God

  but assessing intent. In the Patagonia Mountains

  you think, “small mines, pathetic deaths.” In Cabeza Prieta

  men boiled in their own blood, ground temperature 170°F.

  Contrai
ls of earthen scar-tissue stink of sulfur.

  Gold & copper to buy the horse that died, the woman who left.

  36

  Ten thousand pointless equations left just after dawn,

  the city’s air heavy with the fat of countless dieters.

  Saw Ummon strolling down Wilshire with Yunmen,

  unperturbed, disappearing into each other, emerging

  with laughter. Saw thirty-three green, waking parrots

  watch a single black cat raising the dew as she walked

  across the golf course, the first one to the seventh tee.

  37

  Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too,

  said Rilke one day to no one in particular

  as good poets everywhere address the six directions.

  If you can’t bow, you’re dead meat. You’ll break

  like uncooked spaghetti. Listen to the gods.

  They’re shouting in your ear every second.

  38

  Who remembers Wang Chi, “the real human like

  multiplied sunlight”? No one, of course,

  but his words are a lamp for any fool’s feet.

  He can’t stop you from drowning, but he can keep

  you out of the boat. This water’s meant for careful wading,

  but imagining my ears are gills, I still dive there at night.

  39

  In the next installment I’ll give you Crazy Horse and Anne Frank,

  their conversation as recorded by Matthew of Gospel fame,

  who was wont, as all scriveners, to add a bit of this and that.

  God is terse. The earth’s proper scripture could be carried

  on a three-by-five card if we weren’t drunk on our own blood.

  40

  Walking the lakeshore at first moonlight I can see

  feathers, stones, smooth spars, seaweed,

  and the doe washed up from the Manitous two days ago

  has been nearly eaten by the coyotes and ravens.

  I poke my stick in the moon’s watery face, then apologize.

  41

  Home again. It looked different for a moment.

  The birds, while not decrepit, flew slower.

  The dogs wagged and licked their greetings,

  then went back to sleep, unmindful of airplanes.

  The new moon said either gather yourself for your last

  decade, or slow down big pony, fat snake shed another skin.

  42

  Inside people fear the outside; outside, the in.

  But then I’m always halfway in or out the door,

  most comfortable and at home in this fear,

  knowing that falling is best for my nature.

  Backward works well, or gathered for the leeward

  pitch, imitate the sea in perfect balance in her torment.

  43

  The world is wrenched on her pivot, shivering. Politicians

  and preachers are standing on their heads, shitting

  out of their mouths. Lucky for us Stephen Mitchell

  has restored the Gospels, returning the Jesus

  I imagined at fourteen, offering up my clumsy life

  in a damp shroud of hormones. Most of all he said,

  “Pay attention” – Buddha nodding from the wings.

  44

  The dawn of the day we arrived, Abel Murrietta

  saw a big mountain lion sitting behind our gate.

  This is not an omen but a lion, the border guard

  athwart our time in the chaos of the wild, the other

  that draws us to speechlessness, the lion behind the gate

  turning her head, flowing up the mountainside to sit,

  gazing at twilight at the casita, creek bed, our shared thickets.

  45

  The sound of the dog’s pawsteps move away

  at the precise speed of his shadow. Nothing is blurred.

  The bullet tumbled toward the girl’s head at 1250 feet

  per second. She wasn’t the president, you say,

  too young for politics. Despite theological gooseshit

  the gods don’t keep time in light-years. We’re slowed

  to the brutality of clocks. Listen to the alarm. Wake up.

  46

  Sometimes a toothpick is the most important thing;

  others, a roll of toilet paper. If you forget red wine

  and garlic you’ll become honky new-age incense

  dressed in invisible taffeta. Eat meat or not,

  try weighing your virtue on that bathroom scale

  right after you crap and shower. You’re just a tree

  that grows shit, not fruit. Your high horse is dead meat.

  47

  The girl’s bottom is beautiful as Peacock’s dancing bear

  who is 70 miles from any of our fevered instruments.

  Neither girl nor bear utter a word to the world in between

  in its careless sump. The Virgin said zip to the Garrison.

  If you can’t dance without music jump into an icy lake.

  Think of the brown girl at the A&W Root Beer stand.

  48

  It was Monday morning for most of the world

  and my heart nearly exploded according

  to my digital high-blood-pressure machine,

  telling me I don’t want to work anymore

  as the highest-paid coal miner on earth.

  I want to stay up on the surface and help the heron

  who’s been having trouble with his creek-bed landings.

  He’s getting old and I wonder where he’ll be when he dies.

  49

  Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, I sang in Sunday

  school a lifetime ago, way up in cold country

  where there wasn’t much sun. A sunbeam in winter

  made one recoil, and everyone stared mutely upward.

  The bogeyman still smiles, now from a glass

  of whiskey, then from a farmhouse root cellar.

  A little boy bred this man with no thought of the future.

  50

  If I’m not mistaken, everyone seems to go back

  to where they came from, ending up right

  where they began. Our beloved cat died today.

  She liked to sit on my head during zazen

  back when she was a child. I bow to her magnificence

  beside which all churches and temples are privy holes.

  51

  A lovely woman in Minnesota owned a 100-year-old horse,

  actually thirty-seven, but in horse years that’s at least 100.

  In the third grade I read there were eleven surviving

  Civil War veterans. Under the photo captions it said

  they were mostly drummer boys. Now both

  horse and veterans are dead, the woman married, rid

  of her binding sweetheart horse. I know these peculiar

  things because I’m Jim, at the right place, the right time.

  52

  Once and for all there’s no genetic virtue.

  Our cherubic baldy flounces around, fresh out of Boulder,

  in black robes, Japanese words quick on his tongue.

  World War II nearly destroyed my family, so I ask

  him to learn Chinese. He understands I’m a fool.

  Then over a gallon of wine we agree there’s no language

  for such matters, no happiness outside consciousness. Drink.

  53

  Sam got tired of the way life fudged the big issues,

  drank a quart of vodka, shot himself in the parking lot

  of the tavern. How could a friend do this to himself?

  It was relatively easy. Anyone can do it in a blink.

  We won’t look for black bears again out by Barfield Lakes.

  Some don’t go up in smoke but are strangled off the earth.

  54

  This morning I felt strong and jaunty in my mail-order

  Israeli commando tr
ousers. Up at Hard Luck Ranch I spoke

  to the ravens in baritone, fed the cats with manly gestures.

  Acacia thorns can’t penetrate these mighty pants. Then out

  by the corral the infant pup began to weep, abandoned.

  In an instant I became another of earth’s billion sad mothers.

  55

  I once thought that life’s what’s left over after

  I extricate myself from the mess. I was writing a poem

  about paying attention and microwaved a hot dog

  so hot it burned a beet-red hole in the roof of my mouth.

  Lucrezia Borgia got shit on her fingers by not paying

  attention. Chanting a sutra, the monk stepped fatally

  on the viper’s tail. Every gun is loaded and cocked.

  56

  I’ve emerged from the seven-going-on-eight divorces