Temporary Survivors: (poems...) ...selected from various old notebooks.
Dear
Reader,
I hope that you will enjoy something that you read here. I've gleaned
these poems out of many that were barely worse... their words X'd
out one by one till none remained.
These are the temporary survivors.
Sincerely, Dan Dutton
About the Painting:
I will show you the snake
ahead of time,
a young timber rattler.
This is where I fell in love.
This is a ripple, still expanding.
It is Autumn, unfinished.
This is a strange valley, beautiful.
The water is the color
of an eye,
and snakes live on the bluffs.
Across the canvas is blue;
through it
black and yellow leaves
flutter ceaselessly.
Trip to Devil's Jump:
Down a rutted road
to the river's hot air
stalled thick with jarfly screech
and willow smell.
Watching out
for snakes
beneath the rusting carcass of
the Blue Heron coal tipple.
Across the gorge,
scrawled on a bluff:
"Buck Ross a scab
but not a murderer."
Domestic
The fish, within
a globe of glass
glides alone
but for the cat.
Freedom, indolent cruelty,
claws,
purr just beyond
the crystal wall.
The cat, fat,
reclines aloof,
observes a world
of toys and food.
Halcyon (for Bud & Suzanne)
It is rare that sailors
come to happy endings;
so often snacks
for leviathan,
or landlocked in a bed
that no longer rocks;
prey to duller hungers
than the open sea contains.
Brave man
who takes his siren
for a mate,
and when his bark
is christened "Ship of Fools,
can laugh at the envious
eyes
of would-be prophets
ever on the shore.
You are a blessed' pair;
the only sheep you follow
are the wooly waves,
and safely wander there,
I pray,
with true love
as your guiding star.
Dream
The world is said to spin.
Crows flow out of half-light,
toward the crossbar of a window.
The house is dark, and the river
moves. From black ice, tilting
in black water, black cormorants
lean forward
and dive into the deep.
And though I seem to waken
and run out onto golden leaves,
and stand very still... still
the crows come streaming, cawing;
"Our world, our world, ours!"
Knowledge
In an old orchard,
untended, apples
and pears ripened and fell,
nurturing the stings
of swollen hives, whose
wings
hummed savage
gathering hymns.
Into the green-globed
sky I climbed, reaching for
the utmost golden skin.
Stolen, the honey-fire burst
on my tongue. There I
learned song, crime, love.
House
My house is small
with a wind to every wall,
and those are so thin
that wind whistles in.
The fire I keep
lulls me to sleep,
soft and slow,
through long nights of snow.
A nut in a shell,
I rest very well,
happy, encurled,
content in my world....
Where all I touch
proves little is much.
Wind, fire, rest;
a small house is best.
Five Gallon Day
Wild blackberries are ripe.
The recipe calls for five gallons,
and, of course,
there aren't as many good patches
as way back
when Jennifer picked her treats.
"Sweet, sour, sour, sweet..."
she named them each, according
to their nature.
This year
it is almost as though the Old Summer
days came back,
swelling sweet and black
on the laden canes.
So let the Bacchanalia of
the wild yeasts begin!
Beneath a veil, crazed for days
on pure white sugar, an orgy
of bubbling froth...
Strain it off. What remains
is new wine.
Bottled and sealed
if will improve with time.
So pick them now! Pick the best!
There may still be enough
to get gloriously drunk!
The Kitataki (for Kakuho Ohashi)
At the
end of the night
the curve of the half-moon
was carved of shell,
as the fire-ball of the sun
burned the world's edge of fog.
In his heart
the biwa maker heard
the kitataki
strike the wood for a drum.
With each strike of the chisel,
the biwa maker's life
went into the wood...
A sharp sound, like a spark,
kindled in the center of the egg-shape.
Alert,
the wild boar looked up,
out of the mulberry grove.
The biwa player's hand
began to move like a wing.
Then the kitataki
gave a sudden cry
and started to fly through space.
(The kitataki is a large Japanese woodpecker,
about the size of the pileated. A biwa is a type of lute. My friend,
Mr. Ohashi, is the biwa maker. He carved a biwa out of mountain cherry
for me...the sound holes are decorated with thin crescent moons of shell,
the bridge holes for stringing are poetically called "boar's eyes in a mulberry grove." The
biwa is played with a large triangular plectrum, bigger than the hand,
sometimes with a very fast sweeping movement that reminded me of the
woodpecker's swooping flight. Chisato helped me translate this into Japanese,
and did the calligraphy so that I could present it to Ohashi-san, on
an ink drawing of the woodpecker.)
Unexpected
Spider webs
did not intend to catch
this early snow.
Bob Vaught
He arrived in the damp chill
of November mornings, knowing when
he awoke and went outside
that our tobacco would be "in case."
He parked his antique car at the top
of the hill, walked the wagon road
past our sway-backed, slatted
corncrib to the stripping room;
a dust-floored shed
just tall enough
to stand in, and barely warmed
by a tiny
mica-windowed cast iron stove.
A row of old ripply panes let in
the cloud dim light. I could just
see enough to grade
Trash, Lugs, Red and Tips,
choosing a long, pliant
leaf to tie a hand, twelve hands
to make a stick.
One of his hands was nearly fingerless,
all but three stubs cut off in a railroad
shop accident, and every other word he
said was goddamn. As we worked
through the long monotonous morning,
he told the history of the world...
how he saw a forest of red oaks -
five men couldn't reach around a trunk -
stretching to the horizon
in every direction. He was in
the goddamn crew that cut them down.
Spring Peepers
Winter loosens
its hold.
A mild evening finally comes
when I run back into the house
to say "Come outside!
You can hear the frogs!"
The Music Lesson
Toward shapes
forming at the softest edge
of sound, I lean
into the invisible flow.
The hot still hours of the afternoon
stream, rustling
slowly
in the silver tips of the cottonwood above.
But here, where I sit on the ground,
nothing moves
except the master's hands...
binding thistledown onto a dart.
His words are just as soft and sharp,
and fly
in stealth through silence
to the heart.
Dream
above Grand Gulch Start... dawn!
I've overslept! must get up...
graveling for my flute and bells
in the tent jumble at my feet
and zipper open out.
The sun is white.
The air itself is buzzing white
upon the mica sand like snow...
everything is made of whiteness.
New people join the trek...
Lars and his friend
with a cushaw-sized ocarina...the secret finger-holes
make a spectral symphony
of a single breath.
There's the strange
red dog, Rufus,
beaded with what? dew?
Looking up at me with that strange look.
He takes the shape of a man.
At first I think he has dark tatoos,
but its thick tufts of hair...
he must be one of the Mexican
boys; "Los Lobos."
Now he has an oyster stand.
There's even coarse
fur covering his somehow appealing
face as he hands me a tray,
an open bed of mollusks,
glistening in their shells.
Sharp
Here we are in the Devil's workshop,
sharpening thorns
and the day drags on.
This is the latest machine
for the job, but it isn't any
more efficient
than a knife, really,
since it breaks down constantly
and an
infuriatingly arrogant
and incompetent
repairman must be called in,
so it does add up to Hell
in the long run.
Why sharpen thorns?
You really had to ask that, eh?
Osiris
Your eyebrow glowed
suddenly red gold
in the winter light.
And in a glance
I divide out of conversation;
part of me goes on speaking,
in our comfortable friendship,
about something we both enjoy
figuring out.
Part, the radiant eye
of the falcon sun, laced
with gilded frond, far-sighted,
that one
is suspended in awe
at a god
in the shape of a man.
I must keep perfectly
still
inside the other who converses
with his friend, who offers
a coffee cup.
It is not a sound that trembles
in his ear. It must not
be spoken, but sung
somehow
into the golden mummy case
of his heart.
The Omnichronic Bookshelf; a trap to catch meddlers: Who
is in the gaggle I'd like to be googled in?
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Yasunari Kawabata, Wole Soyinka, Brillat Savarin,
and his translator M.F.K. Fisher, Gaston Bachelard, Basho, Elizabeth
Bishop, Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, ....Percy B. Shelly?