his bare right leg dangling from the bed

(geez, he’s getting big);

sliding a chunk of madrone

into the firebox on a snowy night,

damping the wood heater down

for coals to kindle the morning’s fire;

the way the terriers sneeze and leap and race

deliriously through the orchard

when they know we’re going on a walk;

raindrops still cupped in huckleberry leaves

hours after the rain has stopped:

I made 55 years today, still hanging on,

and though only fools lay claim to wisdom

I don’t know what else to call it

when every year

it takes less to make me happy,

and it lasts longer.

Red Sails

I sit at my desk

and for no apparent reason

start singing, badly,

Red sails in the sunset…

sing it until I sail out of myself,

whatever a self is,

crazier than shit,

you bet,

and deeply grateful.

Squall & Commotion

You’ve reached bottom

when you understand

there is no bottom

to reach.

And just rock there drenched

on the ship’s bow,

watching the rain

fall on the ocean.

Slow Learner

Know the plants.

–GARY SNYDER

It’s been 50 years, most oblivious, but now,

if only in glimpses, I can look at plants

and feel the light composing them.

Falling asleep, I comfort myself

with a little prayer of their names:

alder, larkspur, thimbleberry, salal.

Bathing Joe

AN ELEGY FOR BOB, 1946–1994

The summer of ’94 at French Flat, on a scorching afternoon in mid-July, my brother Bob suggested we bathe his dog Joe, a sixteen-year-old Kelpie. Since Bob held intractably to the notion that bathing dogs more than once a year destroys their essential skin oils, I hustled to gather the leash, towels, and doggie shampoo before he changed his mind.

Joe–112 in human years–truly needed a bath. He suffered every affliction of elderly canines: deaf as dirt; a few glimmers short of blind; lumpy with warts and subcutaneous cysts; a penis pointing straight down; a scrotum so saggy his testicles banged against his hocks; prone to drool; given to a seemingly constant flatulence that would be banned under the Geneva Accords; and possessed of what the genteel call “doggie odor,” which in Joe’s unfortunate case ranged between gaggingly rank and living putrefaction. When Joe dozed by the wood-heater on a winter’s eve, enjoying dinner was difficult– considering one’s watering eyes and the instinct to cover the food.