Front Cover

CONTENTS

FAR WEST       I

A Berry Feast

Marin-an

Sixth-Month Song in the Foothills

The Spring

A Walk

Fire in the Hole

Burning the Small Dead

Trail Crew Camp at Bear Valley

Home from the Sierra

Foxtail Pine

A Heifer Clambers Up

August on Sourdough

Oil

The Wipers Secret

Once Only

After Work

Rolling in at Twilight

Hitch Haiku

How to Make Stew in the Pinacate Desert

Sather

For the Boy who was Dodger Point Lookout

FAR EAST       II

Yase: September

Pine River

Vapor Trails

Mt Hiei

Out West

Ami

The Public Bath

A Volcano in Kyushu

Eight Sandbars on the Takano River

Asleep on the Train

Four Poems for Robin

The Levels

The Firing

Work to do Toward Town

Nansen

Six Years

KALI       III

When I went down

Alysoun

To Hell with your Fertility Cult

For a Stone Girl at Sanchi

Robin

North Beach Alba

Could She See the Whole Real World

Night

A Dry Day Just Before the Rainy Season

Another for the Same

This Tokyo

Kyoto Footnote

The Manichaeans

Artemis

Madly Whirling Downhill

Xrist

More Better

For Plants

What Do They Say

The Six Hells of the Engine Room

Maya

Mother of the Buddhas

Wandering the Old, Dirty Countries

On our Way to Khajuraho

Anuradhapura City of the Pleiades

Circumambulating Arunachala

7: VII

Nanao Knows

Lying in Bed on a Late Morning

Looking at Pictures to be Put Away

The Truth like the Belly of a Woman Turning

For John Chappell

How Many Times

Tasting the Snow

Go Round

After Rāmprasād Sen

BACK       IV

The Old Dutch Woman

Nature Green Shit

To the Chinese Comrades

For the West

7.IV.64

Twelve Hours out of New York

Across Lamarck Col

Hop, Skip, and Jump

August was Foggy

Beneath my Hand and Eye the Distant Hills

The Plum Blossom Poem

Through the Smoke Hole

Oysters

MIYAZAWA KENJI       V

Refractive Index

The Snow on Saddle Mountain

Spring and the Ashura

Cloud Semaphore

The Scene

A Break

Dawn

Some Views Concerning the Proposed Site of a National Park

Cow

Floating World Picture: Spring in the Kitagami Mountains

Orders

Distant Labor

The Politicians

Moon, Son of Heaven

Daydreaming on the Trail

The Great Power Line Pole

Pine Needles

Thief

Dedication

FOR KENNETH REXROTH

“. . .So—when was it—I, drawn like blown cloud, couldn’t stop dreaming of roaming, roving the coast up and down …”

—Basho

A BERRY FEAST

For Joyce and Homer Matson

1

Fur the color of mud, the smooth loper

Crapulous old man, a drifter,

Praises! of Coyote the Nasty, the fat

Puppy that abused himself, the ugly gambler,

Bringer of goodies.

In bearshit find it in August,

Neat pile on the fragrant trail, in late

August, perhaps by a Larch tree

Bear has been eating the berries.

high meadow, late summer, snow gone

Blackbear

eating berries, married

To a woman whose breasts bleed

From nursing the half-human cubs.

Somewhere of course there are people

collecting and junking, gibbering all day,

“Where I shoot my arrows

“There is the sunflower’s shade

—song of the rattlesnake

coiled in the boulder’s groin

“K’ak, k’ak, k’ak!

sang Coyote. Mating with

humankind—

The Chainsaw falls for boards of pine,

Suburban bedrooms, block on block

Will waver with this grain and knot,

The maddening shapes will start and fade

Each morning when commuters wake—

Joined boards hung on frames,

a box to catch the biped in.

and shadow swings around the tree

Shifting on the berrybush

from leaf to leaf across each day

The shadow swings around the tree.

2

Three, down, through windows

Dawn leaping cats, all barred brown, grey

Whiskers aflame

bits of mouse on the tongue

Washing the coffeepot in the river

the baby yelling for breakfast,

Her breasts, black-nippled, blue-veined, heavy,

Hung through the loose shirt

squeezed, with the free hand

white jet in three cups.

Cats at dawn

derry derry down

Creeks wash clean where trout hide

We chew the black plug

Sleep on needles through long afternoons

“you shall be owl

“you shall be sparrow

“you will grow thick and green, people

“will eat you, you berries!

Coyote: shot from the car, two ears,

A tail, brine bounty.

Clanks of tread

oxen of Shang

moving the measured road

Bronze bells at the throat

Bronze balls on the horns, the bright Oxen

Chanting through sunlight and dust

wheeling logs down hills

into heaps,

the yellow

Fat-snout Caterpillar, tread toppling forward

Leaf on leaf, roots in gold volcanic dirt.

When

Snow melts back

from the trees

Bare branches       knobbed pine twigs

hot sun on wet flowers

Green shoots of huckleberry

Breaking through snow.

3

Belly stretched taut in a bulge

Breasts swelling as you guzzle beer, who wants

Nirvana?

Here is water, wine, beer

Enough books for a week

A mess of afterbirth,

A smell of hot earth, a warm mist

Steams from the crotch

“You can’t be killers all your life

“The people are coming—

—and when Magpie

Revived him, limp rag of fur in the river

Drowned and drifting, fish-food in the shallows,

“Fuck you!”sang Coyote

and ran

Delicate blue-black, sweeter from meadows

Small and tart in the valleys, with light blue dust

Huckleberries scatter through pine woods

Crowd along gullies, climb dusty cliffs,

Spread through the air by birds;

Find them in droppings of bear.

“Stopped in the night

“Ate hot pancakes in a bright room

“Drank coffee, read the paper

“In a strange town, drove on,

singing, as the drunkard swerved the car

“Wake from your dreams, bright ladies!

“Tighten your legs, squeeze demons from

the crotch with rigid thighs

“Young red-eyed men will come

“With limp erections, snuffling cries

“To dry your stiffening bodies in the sun!

Woke at the beach. Grey dawn,

Drenched with rain. One naked man

Frying his horsemeat on a stone.

4

Coyote yaps, a knife!

Sunrise on yellow rocks.

People gone, death no disaster,

Clear sun in the scrubbed sky

empty and bright

Lizards scurry from darkness

We lizards sun on yellow rocks.

See, from the foothills

Shred of river glinting, trailing,

To flatlands, the city:

glare of haze in the valley horizon

Sun caught on glass gleams and goes.

From cool springs under cedar

On his haunches, white grin,

long tongue panting, he watches:

Dead city in dry summer,

Where berries grow.

MARIN-AN

sun breaks over the eucalyptus

grove below the wet pasture,

water’s about hot,

I sit in the open window

& roll a smoke.

distant dogs bark, a pair of

cawing crows; the twang

of a pygmy nuthatch high in a pine—

from behind the cypress windrow

the mare moves up, grazing.

a soft continuous roar

comes out of the far valley

of the six-lane highway—thousands

and thousands of cars

driving men to work.

SIXTH-MONTH SONG IN THE FOOTHILLS

In the cold shed sharpening saws.

a swallow’s nest hangs by the door

setting rakers in sunlight

falling from meadow through doorframe

swallows flit under the eaves.

Grinding the falling axe

sharp for the summer

a swallow shooting out over.

over the river, snow on low hills

sharpening wedges for splitting.

Beyond the low hills, white mountains

and now snow is melting.       sharpening tools;

pack horses grazing new grass

bright axes—and swallows

fly in to my shed.

THE SPRING

Beating asphalt into highway potholes

pickup truck we’d loaded

road repair stock shed & yard

a day so hot the asphalt went in soft.

pipe and steel plate tamper

took turns at by hand

then drive the truck rear wheel

a few times back and forth across the fill—

finish it off with bitchmo round the edge.

the foreman said let’s get a drink

& drove through woods and flower fields

shovels clattering in back

into a black grove by a cliff

a rocked in pool

feeding a fern ravine

tin can to drink

numbing the hand and cramping in the gut

surging through the fingers from below

& dark here—

let’s get back to the truck

get back on the job.

A WALK

Sunday the only day we don’t work:

Mules farting around the meadow,

Murphy fishing,

The tent flaps in the warm

Early sun: I’ve eaten breakfast and I’ll

take a walk

To Benson Lake. Packed a lunch,

Goodbye. Hopping on creekbed boulders

Up the rock throat three miles

Piute Creek—

In steep gorge glacier-slick rattlesnake country

Jump, land by a pool, trout skitter,

The clear sky. Deer tracks.

Bad place by a falls, boulders big as houses,

Lunch tied to belt,

I stemmed up a crack and almost fell

But rolled out safe on a ledge

and ambled on.

Quail chicks freeze underfoot, color of stone

Then run cheep! away, hen quail fussing.

Craggy west end of Benson Lake—after edging

Past dark creek pools on a long white slope—

Lookt down in the ice-black lake

lined with cliff

From far above: deep shimmering trout.

A lone duck in a gunsightpass

steep side hill

Through slide-aspen and talus, to the east end,

Down to grass, wading a wide smooth stream

Into camp. At last.

By the rusty three-year-

Ago left-behind cookstove

Of the old trail crew,

Stoppt and swam and ate my lunch.

FIRE IN THE HOLE

Squatting a day in the sun,

one hand turning the steeldrill,

one, swinging the four pound singlejack hammer

down.

three inches an hour

granite bullhump boulder

square in the trail.

above, the cliffs,

of Piute Mountain waver,

sweat trickles down my back.

why does this day keep coming into mind,

a job in the rock hills

aching arms

the muletracks

arching blinding sky,

noon sleep under

snake-scale juniper limbs.

that the mind

entered the tip of steel,

the arm fell

like breath,

the valley, reeling,

on the pivot of that drill—

twelve inches deep we packed the charge

dynamite on mules

like frankincense.

Fire in the hole!

Fire in the hole!

Fire in the hole!

jammed the plunger down,

thru dust

and sprinkling stone

strolld back to see:

hands and arms and shoulders

free.

BURNING THE SMALL DEAD

Burning the small dead

branches

broke from beneath

thick spreading

whitebark pine.

a hundred summers

snowmelt       rock       and air

hiss in a twisted bough.

sierra granite;

mt. Ritter—

black rock twice as old.

Deneb, Altair

windy fire

TRAIL CREW CAMP AT BEAR VALLEY, 9000 FEET. NORTHERN SIERRA—WHITE BONE AND THREADS OF SNOWMELT WATER

Cut branches back for a day—

trail a thin line through willow

up buckbrush meadows,

creekbed for twenty yards

winding in boulders

zigzags the hill

into timber, white pine.

gooseberry bush on the turns,

hooves clang on the riprap

dust, brush, branches,

a stone

cairn at the pass—

strippt mountains hundreds of miles.

sundown went back

the clean switchbacks to camp,

bell on the gelding,

stew in the cook tent,

black coffee in a big tin can.

HOME FROM THE SIERRA

Woke once in the night, pissed,

checkt the coming winter’s stars

built up the fire

still glowing in the chilly dawn.

Washing the mush pot in the lake

frost on the horse turds

a grayjay cased the camp.

All morning walking to the car

load up on granite stone,

seedling sugar pine.

Down to hot plains.

Mexicans on flatcars in the San Joaquin.

cool fog

smell of straw mats

cup of green tea

by the Bay.

FOXTAIL PINE

bark smells like pineapple: Jeffries

cones prick your hand: Ponderosa

nobody knows what they are, saying

“needles three to a bunch.”

turpentine tin can hangers

high lead riggers

“the true fir cone stands straight,

the doug fir cone hangs down.”

—wild pigs eat acorns in those hills

cascara cutters

tanbark oak bark gatherers

myrtlewood burl bowl-makers

little cedar dolls,

baby girl born from the split crotch

of a plum

daughter of the moon—

foxtail pine with a

clipped curve-back cluster of tight

five-needle bunches

the rough red bark scale

and jigsaw pieces sloughed off

scattered on the ground.

—what am I doing saying “foxtail pine”?

these conifers whose home was ice

age tundra, taiga, they of the

naked sperm

do whitebark pine and white pine seem the same?

a sort of tree

its leaves are needles

like a fox’s brush

(I call him fox because he looks that way)

and call this other thing, a

foxtail pine.

A HEIFER CLAMBERS UP

a heifer clambers up

nighthawk goes out

horses

trail back to the barn.

spider gleams in his

new web

dew on the shingles, on the car,

on the mailbox—

the mole, the onion, and the beetle

cease their wars.

worlds tip

into the sunshine, men and women

get up, babies crying

children grab their lunches

and leave for school.

the radio announces

in the milking barn

in the car bound for work

“tonight all the countries

will get drunk and have a party”

russia, america, china,

singing with their poets,

pregnant and gracious,

sending flowers and dancing bears

to all the capitals

fat

with the baby happy land

AUGUST ON SOURDOUGH, A VISIT FROM DICK BREWER

You hitched a thousand miles

north from San Francisco

Hiked up the mountainside       a mile in the air

The little cabin—one room—

walled in glass

Meadows and snowfields,       hundreds of peaks.

We lay in our sleeping bags

talking half the night;

Wind in the guy-cables       summer mountain rain.

Next morning I went with you

as far as the cliffs,

Loaned you my poncho—       the rain across the shale—

You down the snowfield

flapping in the wind

Waving a last goodbye       half hidden in the clouds

To go on hitching

clear to New York;

Me back to my mountain       and far, far, west.

OIL

soft rainsqualls on the swells

south of the Bonins, late at night. Light

from the empty mess-hall

throws back bulky shadows

of winch and fairlead

over the slanting fantail where I stand.

but for men on watch in the engine room,

the man at the wheel, the lookout in the bow,

the crew sleeps, in cots on deck

or narrow iron bunks down drumming

passageways below.

the ship burns with a furnace heart

steam veins and copper nerves

quivers and slightly twists and always goes—

easy roll of the hull and deep

vibration of the turbine underfoot.

bearing what all these

crazed, hooked nations need:

steel plates and

long injections of pure oil.

THE WIPERS SECRET

Down in the bilges

or up out of sight on the bulkheads

time after time

year after year

we paint right over the dirt.

The first engineer

he knows.

but what can he say?

the company says

save time.

ONCE ONLY

almost at the equator

almost at the equinox

exactly at midnight

from a ship

the full

moon

in the center of the sky.

Sappa Creek near Singapore

March 1958

AFTER WORK

The shack and a few trees

float in the blowing fog

I pull out your blouse,

warm my cold hands

on your breasts.

you laugh and shudder

peeling garlic by the

hot iron stove.

bring in the axe, the rake,

the wood

we’ll lean on the wall

against each other

stew simmering on the fire

as it grows dark

drinking wine.

ROLLING IN AT TWILIGHT

Rolling in at twilight—Newport Oregon—

cool of September ocean air, I

saw Phil Whalen with a load of groceries

walking through a dirt lot full

of logging trucks, cats

and skidders

looking at the ground.

I yelld as the bus wheeld by

but he kept looking down.

ten minutes later with my books and pack

knockt at his door

“Thought you might be on that bus”

he said, and

showed me all the food.

HITCH HAIKU

They didn’t hire him

so he ate his lunch alone:

the noon whistle

•       •       •

Cats shut down

deer thread through

men all eating lunch

•       •       •

Frying hotcakes in a dripping shelter

Fu Manchu

Queets Indian Reservation in the rain

•       •       •

A truck went by

three hours ago:

Smoke Creek desert

•       •       •

Jackrabbit eyes all night

breakfast in Elko.

•       •       •

Old kanji hid by dirt

on skidroad Jap town walls

down the hill

to the Wobbly hall

Seattle

•       •       •

Spray drips from the cargo-booms

a fresh-chipped winch

spotted with red lead

young fir—

soaking in summer rain

•       •       •

Over the Mindanao Deep

Scrap brass

dumpt off the fantail

falling six miles

•       •       •

[The following two were written on classical

themes while travelling through Sappho, Washington.

The first is by Thomas L. Hoodlatch.]

Moonlight on the burned-out temple—

wooden horse shit.

Sunday dinner in Ithaca—

the twang of a bowstring

•       •       •

After weeks of watching the roof leak

I fixed it tonight

by moving a single board

•       •       •

A freezing morning in October in the high

Sierra crossing Five Lakes Basin to the

Kaweahs with Bob Greensfelder and Claude Dalenburg

Stray white mare

neck rope dangling

forty miles from farms.

•       •       •

Back from the Kaweahs

Sundown, Timber Gap

—sat down—

dark firs,

dirty;       cold;

too tired to talk

•       •       •

Cherry blossoms at Hood river

rusty sand near Tucson

mudflats of Willapa Bay

•       •       •

Pronghorn country

Steering into the sun

glittering jewel-road

shattered obsidian

•       •       •

The mountain walks over the water!

Rain down from the mountain!

high bleat of a

cow elk

over blackberries

•       •       •

A great freight truck

lit like a town

through the dark stony desert

•       •       •

Drinking hot saké

toasting fish on coals

the motorcycle

out       parked in the rain.

•       •       •

Switchback

turn, turn,

and again,       hard-

scrabble

steep travel a-

head.

HOW TO MAKE STEW IN THE PINACATE DESERT RECIPE FOR LOCKE & DRUM

A. J. Bayless market bent wire roller basket buy up parsnips, onion, carrot, rutabaga and potato, bell green pepper, & nine cuts of dark beef shank.

They run there on their legs, that makes meat tasty.

Seven at night in Tucson, get some bisquick for the dumplings. Have some bacon. Go to Hadley’s in the kitchen right beside the frying steak—Diana on the phone—get a little plastic bag from Drum—

Fill it up with tarragon and chili; four bay leaves; black pepper corns and basil; powdered oregano, something free, maybe about two teaspoon worth of salt.

Now down in Sonora, Pinacate country, build a fire of Ocotillo, broken twigs and bits of ironwood, in an open ring of lava: rake some coals aside (and if you’re smart) to windward, keep the other half ablaze for heat and light.

Set Drum’s fourteen-inch dutch oven with three legs across the embers.

Now put in the strips of bacon.

In another pan have all the vegetables cleaned up and peeled and sliced.

Cut the beef shank meat up small and set the bone aside.

Throw in the beef shank meat,

And stir it while it fries hot,

lots of ash and sizzle—singe your brow—

Like Locke says almost burn it—then add water from the jeep can—

add, the little bag of herbs—cook it all five minutes more—and then throw in the pan of all the rest.

Cover it up with big hot lid all heavy, sit and wait, or drink budweiser beer.

And also mix the dumpling mix aside, some water in some bisquick,

finally drop that off the spoon into the stew.

And let it cook ten minutes more

and lift the black pot off the fire

to set aside another good ten minutes,

Dish it up and eat it with a spoon, sitting on a poncho in the dark.

13.XII.1964

SATHER

old Norwegian by me on the bus,

“travel makes you big”

night ride through Redding,

Red Bluff, north;

“those forests on Snoqualmie Pass

just like the streams and woods

where I grew up—”

an island in the North Atlantic,

Everett at age nineteen

a sailor on a schooner, 1912,

those

loftiest mountains,

how things change.

“I used to like this country—

now I think I’ll live in France”

all my kids grown up.

was a fireman on a coaler,

a logger full of snoose,

a dried out Scandinavian

fisherman’s son gone off to

the Northwest,

name is Sather.

“means ‘mountain summer pasture’

like they have in Norway—it’s a

common name—”

where we take our cow

& up Queets Basin country,

that year, 1964,

was still in August,

ten feet under

snow.

29.X.1964

FOR THE BOY WHO WAS
DODGER POINT LOOKOUT
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO

[On a backpacking trip with my first wife in the
Olympic mountains, having crossed over from the
Dosewallips drainage, descended to and forded the
Elwha and the Goldie, and climbed again
to the high country. Hiking alone down the Elwha
from Queets basin, these years later, brings it
back.]

The thin blue smoke of our campfire

down in the grassy, flowery,

heather meadow

two miles from your perch.

The snowmelt pond, and Alison,

half-stoopt bathing like

Swan Maiden, lovely naked,

ringed with Alpine fir and

gleaming snowy peaks. We

had come miles without trails,

you had been long alone.

We talked for half an hour up

there above the foaming creeks

and forest valleys, in our

world of snow and flowers.

I don’t know where she is now;

I never asked your name.

In this burning, muddy, lying,

blood-drenched world

that quiet meeting in the mountains

cool and gentle as the muzzles of

three elk, helps keep me sane.

YASE: SEPTEMBER

Old Mrs. Kawabata

cuts down the tall spike weeds—

more in two hours

than I can get done in a day.

out of a mountain

of grass and thistle

she saved five dusty stalks

of ragged wild blue flower

and put them in my kitchen

in a jar.

PINE RIVER

for Tetsu

From the top of

Matsue castle

miles of flat ricefields

hills, and a long lake.

a schoolboy looks through a

home made telescope

over the town.

new stores dwarf

this hilltop tower,

diving dolphins on the

roof like horns—

nobody now quite

knows how they hoisted

huge cut stone.

the Matsudaira family

owned it all,

sat in this windy

lookout spire

in winter: all their

little villages

under snow.

VAPOR TRAILS

Twin streaks twice higher than cumulus,

Precise plane icetracks in the vertical blue

Cloud-flaked light-shot shadow-arcing

Field of all future war, edging off to space.

Young expert U.S. pilots waiting

The day of criss-cross rockets

And white blossoming smoke of bomb,

The air world torn and staggered for these

Specks of brushy land and ant-hill towns—

I stumble on the cobble rockpath,

Passing through temples,

Watching for two-leaf pine

—spotting that design.

in Daitoku-ji

MT. HIEI

I thought I would

sit with the screens back

and sing: watching the

half gone       moon rise late

but my hands were too numb

to play the guitar

the song was cold mist

the wine wouldn’t warm

so I sat at the border

of dark house and moon

in thick coat—seeing stars rise

back of the ridge.

like once when a lookout

I took Aldebaran

for fire.

OUT WEST

In the cross field

all day a new gas cultivator

cough cough       down each row

frizzing the soil, fine chopper “friable”

before it was cucumber,

the boy in a straw hat

clumsily turns at the end of a run

shifting levers,

through deodar limbs come the gas fumes

cucumber vines

poles and straw ropes

torn down, two crops a summer,

last year the family

was out there with hoes,

the old woman dead now?

one-eyed chop tongue rotary

bucks and wheezes,

that straw hat shaped like a stetson

wearing those tight blue jeans.

Kyoto

AMI       24.XII.62

Hair a wild stroke of black

on white

pillow—

knees flexing up playing

white sheets and gown,

gold-brown grass on the hillside

clouds over twisted pine

jabs of rain down from Mt. Hiei

“we never thought he’d be a boy”

nobody home at the house

the father has gone off to teach

the light at the gate is still on

“he’s been printing on broken stone”

thru the window.

lettuce and onions no matter how cold.

does he know? that he has a new boy?

the dog has stoppt barking

sits shivering

and shivering

tied to the woodshed door frame.

THE PUBLIC BATH

the bath-girl

getting dressed, in the mirror,

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