Last night I was in San Francisco staying in Gene Ruggles’ guest bedroom. I slept in the room reserved for John Logan, and I read a postcard poem of Maui and his visit to WS Merwin‘s place. He wrote how the angle of ceiling to cliff affected the color of the sky.
Today is the anniversary of James Wright’s death. And I haven’t written a poem in ages. All these lines are bouncing and now I’m imagining that I’m sitting in Albion where I saw the water snake swimming along the bottom of the ditch full of standing water. I had never seen a snake slide along the bottom of water before. He poked his head tiny head up for a breath, looking like a stick with a tiny forked tongue flittering, testing the breeze.
And Leonard Cirino told me how the pygmy forest soil doesn’t perk water so Leonard‘s house was red tagged last summer. The well made everyone sick. Now the new pump delivers water to the heart of the house. But the ground holds water, it can’t shake the memory of marine terraces. It dreams of the ocean pounding along its shore instead the soft winds and irregular tides rustling through the cypress needles and the ground sighs with the faint color of bleached bones fallen from the ancient trees.
Found on a scrap of paper, undated, later coerced into a poem on 3/25/85. So I’ll post it there for now.
