EASTER EVE
Meanwhile, somewhere over the Rockies,
all that easily-earned green is beginning to disappear
as rain turns to snow at higher elevations.
Coastal spring recedes back into winter mountains.
Hell’s Gate. Helena. Lewis and Clark slept here.
What about Sakajawea? And the child nursing at her breast?
The dark thoughts of feathers hampered by rain.
If one listens with patience the old message still gets through.
As the plane descends, my mind won’t let go:
Though he still wears the angry colors of the tyrant’s robes,
he’s late in coming to that expansion of the soul.
The snow is falling like rice from a slow wedding sky.
Variations of white ride a landscape of inescapable rhythm.
The moon came up 50 minutes earlier than it did the night before.
The land of shining mountains: Montana. The Bitterroots, the Abskaroka.
What is truth? Beauty? If one knows how to listen.
When fall promised the salvation of darkness into the feather,
Chief of the Crows, Plenty Coups died at the age of 34.
On the bare tree, a hard leaf hangs on like a death sentence.
Red maple leaf encased in ice like a jewel for my foot to find
as I stepped from the heated van onto the truth of ice.
I’m not interested in the outcome where the loser gets the man.
I’m here to teach the children about poetry.
An Arab mathematician said: One is the first figure of endless numbers.
What about zero, null and void? and the negative nimbers?
If one listens with patience the old message still gets through.
After the stroke, Ram Dass sits in the darkening shadow of long evening.
The mind..., he says.
The mind. Leaves rustle in the courtyard.
The mind.
Silence. His eyes close, head tilted toward the stars, at a loss for words.
First gathering of words on the lips:
ma ma ma ma
I am, I am: said the tang and surcease of the sea.
I exist, therefore I am. I yam what I yam. (Yogi Berra).
I stood there in front of his house, you know,
I just stood there looking at a closed door.
Cogito ergo sum.
One tear met another floating down the river.
Said the first tear: I am the tear of the woman who lost her love.
Said the other: I am the tear of the woman who got him. (Chinese)
The wind nibbles at the corner of the eye.
The slow breathing of long distance rain on the hills.
That’s what poetry is. Simple, elegant: Occam’s Razor.
Tonal languages:
ma = horse, ma = woman, ma = scold, ma = grass.
It’s all in how you say it and the context it is given.
Somewhere out there is the river. Yellow stone.
Little Bighorn. Greasy Grass. The Powder, the Little Powder.
53,000 miles of stream bed: each chooses one sea over the other.
The Great Divide. If a tear falls in each stream, then what?
Einstein discovered the flow of time is relative to the observer.
I carry a photo with me for when I need to restore what was lost.
I am the despair of the sand speaking in razor-sharp tongues.
The wind drives me from the crests of mountains to the depths of the sea.
Plenty Coups said education is your most powerful weapon.
With it, you are the white man’s equal.
Without it, you are his victim.
He saw it was time to change.
Time is relative to the observer.
The search for truth is hard, or it is easy. If one listens.
It is evident no one can master it fully or miss it wholly.
From all the facts assembled, there arises a certain grandeur. (Aristotle)
The sum of what is equal to the rate of decay.
Ancient Babylonians studied algebra, and they didn’t survive, see?
What is the half-life of a marriage?
There is a natural poetry in common names.
Read the names of the towns and cities, of the creeks and rivers.
Read them aloud. There is a pattern, a kind of folk-music in itself,
alive with a beauty that is sometimes smooth singing,
sometimes sharp as a trapper’s knife.
When she was a girl, Helena’s brother always carried her to the cornfields before dinner. He’d pick the ears of corn and then hand them to her. They were small suns resting in her arms. Fifty years later, he went to answer the phone and found he’d misplaced his speech inside the ear of the Trojan horse, alongside the weapons of the stroke. But those ears of corn whispered a poem in her ear, whispering the words she never said, and he could only mutely acknowledge her, nodding his head to her poem whispering in his ear.
Cornlight.
Abskaroka: hides a tongue.
Absa- large beaked bird.
Crow tongue: Shoshone: stinking water. Headwaters of the Missouri.
Ah-mah-tahro-shosh-sher: The stream that scolds all others.
Gros vendre, big muddy crow. Pick the eyes out of the fallen.
Missoula:
issoul: horrible (Hell’s Gate)
Annus horriblis.
Assinaboine: stone boilers. The loose-tongued music of the river.
At the Talking Tongue, the crookedest stream in Montana,
they named Sakajawea’s son, Baptiste.
Amor non tenet ordinem. Who is listening?
Love is a drowning in flood waters. (9th c. Irish).
Terra nullis. To walk, in Maylay, is to eat the wind.
When Plenty Coups died, the Crow decided no one could take his place
so they never again elected a chief. Where does that put us? With Carter?
On the bare tree, a hard leaf hangs on like a death sentence.
I inherited my mother’s hatred of her name. Not Helen. Maureen.
Why did she name me thus? Am I She of the sea? The Morríghan?
The great warrior queen stood raven-shouldered at the hero’s fall.
The Morríghan with the head of a crow and a taste for men’s eyes.
Her breasts were Trojan horses filled with shining cancer.
Fort Keogh: Captain Myles Keogh’s horse, Comanche, survived Little Bighorn.
They found him tearing the greasygrass—grass so rich, it would fatten a stone.
Garyowen, the marching song of the Cavalry. Sean, south of...where?
A long way from home in any language, where are ye now?
The Morríghan found you here too.
William Blake was the son of an Irish hosier.
At the age of four, he saw God in an apple tree.
Timothy Leary turned his death into a media event, Ram Daas said:
We met as adventurers. People wanted wisdom from TIm. He was just playing his role.
What of Heremon, the King of Spain?
CuChulainn, Hound of Ulster, read the red hand.
Life, being what it is, one dreams of revenge. (Gauguin)
Epona , horse of strength and beauty; both male and female.
Rhiannon, The Morríghan, ancestor goddess.
Tir gan teanga, tir gan anim: A land without a tongue, a land without soul.
Spring came early one year, third grade teacher Bob Kappel found a confused Canada goose on the playground chasing students. Since he had a farm he took the goose home in the truck.
OK, so it was the 6th century, BC.
Pleasure is plural, pain is singular.
To see eternity in a grain of sand.
Well, the goose noticed the fence posts whizzing by and he wasn’t having to work his wings, and so he began to flap them in the truck cab. Bob had to pin him down in order to drive.
The lack of symmetry, known as CP violation says particles and anti-particles decay differently. But CP violation doesn’t account for the antimatter paradox.
He let the goose go with his other geese, but it took off again. However, the weather had warmed so much, south wasn’t such an urgency for the snowbird.
The number of astronomical units in a light year (63,240)
is virtually the same as the number of inches in a mile (63,360).
In the local paper: a missing goose ad. “Please help Freddie come home. Still missing, was last seen on 9th Street two weeks ago. Please call Mrs. Ida Richardson 628-6311.” Well, someone photocopied the ad, put it on the teacher’s room fridge with a note: “Leave it Kappel to get someone’s goose!”
Beware of synchronicity. Therein lies the way to madness.
What is the problem? The speed of thought is claimed to be 150 mph. Few are caught speeding.
(Bob once put Elmer’s glue in Sharon’s hand lotion and soap in her hair spray. and as the day progressed, her hair got flatter and flatter... But he didn’t marry her.)
Sakharov proposed the laws of physics were out of balance
favoring the existence of matter over anti-matter for some reason.
Circling the rim rock of Billings at sunset, under a full moon.
Myriad tongues of the Clark Fork, multiple channels,
white against the dark numberless islands, saying goodbye in all languages.
Airborne over Montana. Granite Peak rimes in cloud cap, lit by the rising moon.
You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces
to realize that memory is what makes our lives. (Bunel)
I can trace the course of the river canyons by strings of lights that begin like a lone flame cresendoing into a candelabra as it tumbles down the mountains to the Central Valley, a bathtub ring of light reestablishing the ancient shoreline of the Precambrian sea, as if the earth glowed from within.
There is no word for
problem in Quechua.
The geometric patterns of industry and suburb like ideograms of light for the moon to see. Industry’s strange calligraphy abutting the edges of the hills, a spillage of light up the canyons, privileged herringbone of parking lots. The staring eye of stadiums long after the game’s over.
Stray renegade light slices the night as we descend, Dantesque. We bow before Moloch on this eve of Easter, a basilisk about to walk on water, but terra firma replaces water at the last minute...blue eyes to ward off evil greets us, guide us home to the portal.
4/23/03
