Traveling with Crows

What keeps us?

Wind, wings, and wizardry keep us
next to the promise of spring, even
rivermud drying on the dog
tells us things can change.

In the middle of a moonless night,
stars obscured by clouds, rain
pelting on, what can we
but hunker down in our own limbs,

remember how to caress ourselves?
Stark mornings do come on then
when the sky as it might could be
translucent as wings, delicious

fruit for any kind of day at all.
Like yesterday.  Along the roadway,
spinning into motion, small seeds
take to air, the owl with talons carved

toward some bloody meal.  Even
the coyote by the roadside so much
a dog on the hearth, ears tipped,
tail flung out to full stride.

Still spring comes.
Still the river greens its way onward.
Still the trout will rise and snap all the weak
lines, bursting sunwater realm
beyond understanding.

Going Off

Falling off the earth kind of feeling, right after a launch downhill on the mountain bike, no sense of wheels or brakes, rock or earth, just wind.  And right there, the wind is almost too much, because of an austere focus, eyes glued to the recession of space below, that the wind interrupts.  I can almost find my edge there, ironically, a couple thousand out for the suspension that holds me upright for this downhill.  Technical information like the disc brakes, the fork in the fore, the cost of my gears, the name of the bike (Stumpjumper, though I plan not to), all of that is not for me.  I can't imagine why I'm here, really, except that the mountains call me here.  In an hour and a half, I covered more ground than I could ever give an afternoon to on foot, and the climb up wasn't easy, either.  My heart pounding out of my eardrums, I had to get off, walk the bike.  At the top of Keswick Dam, one of the country's biggest EPA cleanup sites, I caught my breath watching a vulture wheel overhead.  Salmon the bird's honey target there, dead in pieces all along the Sacramento.  I wonder how the salmon get on from here, or if they, too, must stop at Keswick, named after the man who mined this place. 

Later, recovering, taking my turkey dinner out of the oven at my home, I listen to the news, the representative from West Virginia touting the benefits of coal.  Better than diesel.  I bet no one will take the time to clean up West Virginia.  The mines will pock a mountain of black flies.  That's all I remember from a Fourth of July softball game in West Viriginia.  All those black flies swarming on my face.  I felt so much like I wanted to be anywhere else, and now I am.  Maybe like here, all the West Virginia young people will join the Marines.  Sail the world.  I don't know, but the advantage of old iron ore mines and acidity running off at alarming rates is this unpaved raw landscape to ride around.  So I push my bike upward, explore the wreckage, pump my veins full with blood, rise into the steep decline I will eventually turn myself into, clasping my brakes hard all the way down.

Lost in the Woods

 

The woods is not lost—

even the tenderest cedar shoots

into a blaze of mossy manzanita,

knows its way—

and I stand here listening

to squirrel and woodpecker thrum,

heat and flies, bumblebees

at the edge of garden dream

deep into something just

escaping me, some truth coming

to the surface, essence, nature.

Absurd tension of me here

where the woods knows

where it is,

its own plot

towering

in canopies

and springing free from rocks

that crack with time,

someone’s time after my time,

the sliding downhill rockface

impervious to its plight.