FIRST TIME

FIRST TIME
— for Jim Byrd

Our canoe rounded a sheltered river bend

collecting calm emerald water

until it glistened in a slow curved smile.

The towering trees punctuated its mirrored speech.

From our raised paddles, words escaped

unannounced as water droplets

spawning concentric ripples

in an undulating desire toward shore.

Who is naming these silent tremblings,

sneaking up, canoe-like along the river

where, like deer coming down for an evening drink,

our hearts stopped, afraid to slake their thirst?

Who will stand guard while they ask the river

where the trees stop and the reflections begin?

Through the trees the wind is trickling.

Only the shore answers in a slow curved smile.

Years later, while drinking from separate rivers

we keep asking each other the same questions,

and our hearts, no less thirsty or afraid,

find nothing in the backwaters, except ourselves.

1983
rev./88
Forestville

1984 Deepest Valley Review

ARCHITECTURE OF BONES

ARCHITECTURE OF BONES
          —for Bill Snow

Some members of the Donner Party didn't wait for spring.

Their bones grew new coats of skin.

The survivors slept, dreaming of hot ash bonfires

remembered the earth was a vast burial ground

but did nothing.

Deep inside, the earth shuddered.

Liquid bones of molten lava tried to escape

& snow soothed the terrible thirst

from their hearts.

They say beauty is only skin-deep.

Skin stretched over the cheekbones of women

means nothing without inner structure.

Leaves are homeless without

wind-polished femurs of trees

to hold them to sunlight.

Look to the architecture of bones for strength.

Without them, holding snow would be impossible.

Mountains would bleed back into the sea.

In spring, no skin would slough off

to reveal the bare-boned mountains.

Who keeps moving the bones?

Soon they will rise up

& reassemble themselves

but the pattern is forgotten

& the earth's strength is altered.

Bare bones. Hidden bones.

For a year, Albion Ridge

swallowed the bones of young girls.

The murder was not avenged.

No one lit hot ash bonfires for them.

Their skin sank into the earth in a slow trickle

& the trees were the only ones left to listen

to the soft music

of skin falling from bones.

10/31/82

Sebastopol

rev.88

1985 Napa Poetry Review
1984 Deepest Valley Review
1983 Poets of the Vineyard, 2nd Prize
1983 ARC/Rural Arts Services
1983 Poets of the Vineyards, 2nd prize