You cannot remember, nor can I, the real
simplicity and complexity of being three.
The blissful ignorance of the world, mixed
with the frustration of using a fork. The stabbing
never stops. It becomes a never-ending ingestion
of the insistent world—at odds
with what feels natural.
I can only vaguely remember yesterday—
because my head is so full of it—
the great man-made erasure.
There are tiny flowers, nearly
too small to see, and they grow
from miniature fishers in the wall
of Half Dome. On a blistered
July Tuesday, some twenty
years ago, I hung freely
from a belayed harness, with
a firmly locked carabiner.
I was suspended, in time and location.
It is a place people are not
supposed to be. A place for birds
and thermals that flow like erect
rivers, rushing into the firmament.
I can only say that I was there,
between the immovable rock
and the swallowing sky—
between heaven and earth,
between a thrill and good sense.
In that impossible moment,
it was there, on the wall,
the smallest flower in the world,
planted in a pinch of earth,
living in a tiny fracture
of solid rock—purpleness
in the grey. This is how it is,
in Yosemite. The grandness
for tourists is the vista, and they weep
at the magnificence, in weeping lines,
moving along—tourists replaced
by other tourists.
The prominence of Yosemite,
is only partly understood
in the panorama. It is passed over
by the greedy—“the gorgeous”
is also revealed when looking intimately.
Yosemite drips surprises, gifts
for a lucky few, those who stop being
other tourists—those who drink
grandeur from tiny glasses.
In the green of San Francisco’s
Central Park, a 50 year old man
on a bench looks hard at a
teenager bent over to drink
from a fountain. He disengages
with a confidence, consuming
yellow crackers.
Teenagers understand it,
that they are being surveyed—
and they are not angry.
They are always half-aware
that they have been loosed
into the primal world
where their young bodies
are used to sell picture frames.
They are eager to be safe,
to be locked inside cages.
In Ireland, there is a hillside,
green with sweet grasses,
reflected perfectly
in a winding river.
White sheep dot the green
field like pasty cotton
clouds dot the blue sky.
A brilliant white wolf leans
down, mouthing the grass,
slowly inching toward a lamb.
In the river’s reflection, it all looks
the same.
“She went to the river” flowed
out of the mouths of Babe’s
4 year old girls, “told us”—in unison,
“she would go there.” And she did
tell them
her last day would be like this. Just a body
lifted from the bed, arching over and over,
with crescent shadows appearing
on the walls, on the creamy walls. “She was
here last night, with the door open, Daddy,
she said she would go to the river—
she said to tell you she was not here—
she said it was OK to help her body die.”
And then he heard it again, the protesting gate opening to the graveyard.
Police lined up for a mile with black badges and news crews. Richard Corban was a high school bully – turned bully-with-a-badge
like the others, eventually the cars left
and the diggers quickly finished the sunny task.
And later he retold the story, to the guys at the bar who knew Dick.
―That moron broke down the door and got shot in the head, which is what happens when you break down enough doors.
Something is wrong with the surprise and the fanfare –
and with jailing the frightened shooter who ―”had a gun”
too.
It’s absurd if you think about it—
a specter appearing before we die
with a scythe? Absurd in part
because specters are wasted on the dying.
What of the animals?
Is there a boney specter-raccoon harvesting
coons caught by the hounds?—
a giant skeletal Clydesdale for the Budweiser horses?
Maybe so.
Maybe there’s a place full of spectral animals,
some creepy-boney petting zoo
teeming with fleshless creatures disappearing
when they collect their late counterparts
and then reappearing in an odd display.
A neutral place
where they exist, silently disappearing
and reappearing over and over—
some dark spine-chilling disco-zoo
with pale strobing animal-reapers popping in and out
like spooky dancers.