For Lithia Park,
    the creek plays Ashland's floating
    sunshine and broad leaves!

Second annual solo pack
(Half Moon Lake in Desolation Wilderness)

He hiked past esoteric bonds
and common levels to a lecherous period,
leaving boyish ways
on landings below so-many women.

Going for the canyon throat
seemed natural among contrapuntal,
growling bird songs
and tobacco brush threat of rain

until slopes became granite hard
under the extra weighted once-a-year pack,
and rain soaked Grass Lake
searched in circles, and Susie Lake

changed air to dark white.
Snow began falling straight
from grace dangerous enough to kill
in seconds, maybe minutes while he watched.

Morning arrived without gloves. Frost bite
saturating the empty white cirque
almost drove him running. But working intervals prevailed
like a slowing brain or dying factory.

Downward, in deep lower forest,
yellow and green rose from narrow rains.
Then, wind at his back,
profusion changed to snow again and shot past him.

Green

Trees.
Thousands of green skies
and ground under rain.

How is it with you?
Do your pure white limbs
uproot like chickweed or thyme
and cover thought with lightning
like a dove lonely on telephone wire?

I open this green heart for miles
so you will see the exalting seam
quietly growing older than anything
and swallowing health,
expecting you to touch my shoulder
as if you were here
inside me inside you,
as if poetry could do something.

Drowned by sun spreading this color,
comes my flesh but not the meaning,
its power misplaced,
lifelong relinquished to symbols
that take frail willing ignorance.

Green my hand,
green the tongue that speaks love
over the electric distance
believing every word you spoke
but not saved by the end at last.

Dreamer
Laughs

"That's why god gave his hands away."

To keep cruel track.
More people morepeople more undersevered people.
Severely
the lonely instinct surviving originates.
Stripped existence below peoples
themorepeople madnesses pounding short breaths
into heartened torque escapades.
Hidden and suppressed go by
AGGRESSIVE.
Pristine fear morepeople rock aged horror
more food water.
Enough space? Time more people?
SURREPTITIOUS individuals
becoming cannot.
"Read from pain and wisdom
spread here lest
flashed sparks crush 1) joy accident accidents
2) infant boys straining moon 3) supped foundling moons
laughing blue before
hands that amongst them had between."

Undivisioned invisible receded and vanish taken.
Morepeople morepeople know
panic enough assault
more more
less less.

Their baths

Why, my porcelain back joins the
tiled and marbled wall.
The slightly tangled spring water,
first and ancient as earth,
as Queen of Cups,
insulates my chest,
my sparkled eyes
spigoted to the badgered ripples
of self-made selves.

Romans near my head!
Fleshy dense togas and wars!
Transformers, molders, in the underground
plunge of cave encountered
by water spread limestone!

In proper corners
of dressing quarters,
cave profused
angles and columns document,
1. noble stairs
on quelled blood,
2. perfectly cultivated flat choices,
3. sounds accurate as reverberation,
4. each slide glanced water
purely ducted from tiny clinks.
No Roman or Roman's man
would seek fountainheads
with magic and gods this close or

pax extended unripened (hasty) deaths
delivered still in divine shadows.

        But I have the peace,
        the short peace that passed by.
        Me and darting water
        and concealed echoes
        and the surviving view
        they occupied with
        the cave's open side,
        open as Gainsborogh without
        horses, open as ten Parrishes
        without the virtues of Mazda.
        I alone am falling on
        piped time and
        water uncertain
        middle stages: the
        owned natural springs of walled lichen,
        well traveled mist, ferns of every group,
        and if an animal wanders by, silently.

        Alone for
        the squared wall's bath
        and the spigoted water
        near and above my shoulder,
        a bird reports balance and
        candid wing throat-and-beak.
        It flutters
        the marble and seasoned tile.
        It wants here
        and a corner nest
        without a mate.
        A singing sparrow, I think with ornithology.
        I don't know if it made its way in
        down the stairs
        or imagined itself,
        pastoral and sub-alpine,
        from the outside mural.
       
        It does not matter.
        We are happy
        as stone and flesh,
        antiquated and likely
        to have never happened,
        not even in possible secrets -
        easy and happy-gladdened,
        empty with interest, naked
        to the bath we know

        avowed by sound.
        Presiding water.
        Fortunate recapitulating surfaces
        and the seizing bird.
        I begin nothing
        to reverse happiness,
        that a mortal bowl
        would replace glory
        though the bowl tries
        glory's nature.

        Is three-sided happiness
        immovable, passé? The water
        spouts and I watch my eyes
        and what sits against
        the bath's wall: enough silence.