with evil dreams

in a tossing bed by me

under the low limbs of a Silver fir.

TO HELL WITH YOUR FERTILITY CULT

To hell with your Fertility Cult, I

never did want to be fertile,

you think this world is just

a goddamn oversize cunt, don’t you? Everything

crowding in and out of it like a railway

terminal       and isn’t that nice?

all those people going on trips,

well this is what it feels like, she said,

—and knocked the hen off the nest, grabbed

an egg and threw it at him, right in the face,

the half-formed chick half clung, half slid

half-alive, down over his cheekbone, around

the corner of his mouth, part of it thick

yellow and faintly visible bones and it drippt

down his cheek and chin

—he had nothing to say.

FOR A STONE GIRL AT SANCHI

half asleep on the cold grass

night rain flicking the maples

under a black bowl upside-down

on a flat land

on a wobbling speck

smaller than stars,

space,

the size of a seed,

hollow as bird skulls.

light flies across it

—never is seen.

a big rock weatherd funny,

old tree trunks turnd stone,

split rocks and find clams.

all that time

loving;

two flesh persons changing,

clung to, doorframes

notions, spear-hafts

in a rubble of years.

touching,

this dream pops. it was real:

and it lasted forever.

ROBIN

I always miss you—

last fall, back from the the mountains

you’d left San Francisco

now I’m going north again

as you go south.

I sit by a fire at the ocean.

How many times I’ve

hitchhiked away;

the same pack on my back.

Rain patters on the rhododendron

cloud sweeps in from the sea over sand dunes

and stoopt lodgepole pine.

Thinking of the years since we parted.

last week I dreamed of you—

buying a bag of groceries

for Hatch.

Sutton Lake, Oregon, 16 June 1954

NORTH BEACH ALBA

waking half-drunk in a strange pad

making it out to the cool gray

san francisco dawn—

white gulls over white houses,

fog down the bay,

tamalpais a fresh green hill in the new sun,

driving across the bridge in a beat old car

to work.

COULD SHE SEE THE WHOLE REAL WORLD WITH HER GHOST BREAST EYES SHUT UNDER A BLOUSE LID?

“A woman smells like fresh-plowed ground”

“A man smells like chewing on a maple twig”

Rockslides in the creek bed;

picking ferns in the dark gorge.

Goldwire soft short-haired girl, one bare leg up.

Cursing the morning.

“it’s me there’s no—”

Yellow corn woman on the way to dead-land

by day a dead jackrabbit,

by night a woman nursing her live baby.

Bridge of sunflower stalks.

Nursing a live baby.

daytime, dead-land, only a hill.

Cursing the morning.

“My grandmother said they stepped single

& the hoof was split”—deer

Yellow corn girl

Blue corn girl

Squawberry flower girl

“Once a bear gets hooked on garbage there’s no cure.”

NIGHT