In Time of WAR

Though my country is at war, I go about

Daily tasks — a second key for my daughter’s car,

A loose lens reset in wife’s eyeglasses,

Summer peaches peeled for my son —

While other sons, daughters, wives die 

In minor clashes of mindless violence.

Who but death wins in war?  Who but the dead are safe?

Not the torn bodies, the mangled minds. 

Not the normalcy, such as mine, bitter

That my country is needlessly at war but

Never ceasing to carry on, rising

for another glass of water, 

Buttering the toast for breakfast,

Bleeding the abnormal to normal! 

The war distant and muffled, the killing less wrong.

I choose to live in its shadow, fazed

But teetering on, these feet, these hands,

This brain, these thoughts, these words.

Who will forgive my urge to silence

Their baneful and muted mutterings?     

______________________________________________________________

A Neighbor Listens for Our Daughter’s Violin

She practices hard, and long,

Sibelius, plaintive tones streaming into sunlight, 

Wind gathering and scattering notes.

Bill, our neighbor, said to me one time her practicing

Was the best thing about our living next door,

Said he often stopped what he was doing

To listen; Bill, dead now two years,

Long before she began the Sibelius piece.

It might have been Mozart he listened for. 

Bach. Brahms. Is the music saved

In his memory, notes deteriorating

As sentience decays, the remembrance gone?

I visited his grave. In a national cemetery, 

For veterans. Plots very narrow, graves very close,

Close enough to hear music if remembered.

And I wondered did he wonder did she still practice,

Wondered if a dead brain can wonder — we doubt 

But don’t know: the old 99.9999 scientist strive for.

He worked forty years at the national ag lab

Research in food production, processing, microbes.

“Bugs,” he said. “Bugs so small you don’t see them.”

“And, yes, I thought you might be an invasive species

When you moved in. Always a possibility, you driving 

A BMW and all that. Then the children came.

I said, ‘for sure.’ I said to Theresa, ‘Now

We’ll have noise on our block again,

Screaming and shouts, roller skates down the sidewalk.’ 

Instead came the music, which I loved,

Not just for the sound, but for the practice.

The patience, the repetition, the care.

Focusing, fixing mistakes,  

The daily drilling to get things right.

— Run it again until you have what you want!

One thing I learned in the lab
Scientists have to walk back their certainties, 

Almost always, almost certainly, almost ever.”

And now he lies in that narrow grave, unable 

To walk back death, listening now, if at all, to

The winds from the delta whistling over the grass.

______________________________________________________________

MENDOCINO CANTATA

I: Loggers’ Morning

Fog drifting, needles dripping, 

Crosscut blade 'schuttching,'

Rup-rup spasms of banded steel.

Hammer shouting to a wedge.

Canthook, peavey, cantilever;

Hobnails spitting bark.

Crack and whack of a two-bit axe.

Ox whip snapping in fog.

Hand tools dwarfed by towering spires.

Imagine the demin-clad:

The Irish, the Chinese, Swede, Scot,

Lilliputian men, working like insects.

Then see the awesome leaning,

The ravaged giant banging the earth

Like the fist of an aggrieved God.

Silence, silence, silence: then

Oxen turning their ears to the ‘tap-tap’

Of the gandy dancer, driving spikes,

Bringing in the track 

That will be bringing in the flat

That will carry the redwood away.

II: You’ll Never Miss It

Sunrise, Gualala River.

A chainsaw splutters somewhere.

Down Highway 1, a logging truck cruises

toward the river, purring steadily: contented

Kenworth 4900. 

Picking up speed, it slips

Across the bridge in a loud breathy wheeze,

Then erupts, roars like a Cyclops blinded, 

Climbing the hill into Sonoma County.

The flanks of the roadbed like cupped hands

Funnel the roar, shouting

Back to Mendocino County,

"It's just another load of logs.

You'll never miss it!"

III: Lament of the Greenwood Ridge Sawmill

We screamed like nestlings

And they brought us food:

Pine, redwood, fir, oak.

They cut logs in lengths to fit our maws,

Laid them in our mouths

With great care like a mother bird.

We were loved and valued.

They raked away and burned our waste.

We grew in number, twenty-two

Maddened, wood-hungry beasts

From the Gualala to the Noyo, 

Filling fog-cooled mornings

With the scream of blade tearing wood.

Deep in canyons, high on hillsides,

Men labored to bring our food.

The land lived for us.

First oxen, then steam rigs, 

Then the great diesel trucks

Brought our sustenance.

In time the great trucks passed us by.

Bright teeth dulled in winter rain;

We ceased to scream.

Other men came, rough men with tools.

Piece by piece they tore us apart:

The circles of teeth, the beamed carriages,

The cast bearings. 

                 Off to strange places

They carried us: Sumatra, Malaysia.

Where again we chewed through 

Sweet pine and ironwood.

Some of us were scrapped: 

Melted down, changed forever from

the screaming circles of steel.

They stilled the great fire in front of me.

They rolled up the belt that spun my teeth.

They carried it down the hill and went away.

I watch the diesels pass on the highway below.

Rust has darkened my teeth;

Rain has chewed at the earth under me.

Thistle and scotch broom climb the hill, 

like infantry, year by year.

How quickly things pass away.

IV: Lament of the Lost Tribes

Here in the wet land, the fogbound

Canyons of snake stone and redwood, 

The clean land where winter rain falls

Like graywater from a god hell-bent on

Scouring the land to bedrock.

Here the hills were steep, the soil loose. 

There were no caves; we did not leave paintings.

We did not sketch our gods:

The stars, the sea, the rivers, the earth.

We carved in wood our brothers: the seal, the otter, 

the raven, the salmon, 

               and the earth took those back,

as it should, since all things belong to the earth.

You may find the occasional pointed stone

We placed where trails crossed to mark

One way or another, or the sharpened stone

We used to gut fish, but that is all. 

We did not build temples.

Remember, we too were human;

Remember, we loved the earth.

Will they say the same of you

When time removes all trace

That you have ever been here?