Read an Excerpt
Walking Toward the End
I’m beating north again,
a thousand miles
from the pole, and as it’s
still late summer, I
may get a long way
before cold nights
and the hunger of old age
consume me, a little
lighter each day, having
left more of life’s
sweet confusion in
the grasses I’ve been
tracking through since
crossing above
the tree line, a week ago
toward something
I sense I’ve always been,
my hunger and discomfort, only
physical, slaked by the joy
of having nothing
but the next low ridge ahead,
as far as I can see.
World
There is nothing in the picture
you don’t see. That is, there
is nothing in the picture, but
you can’t see it, as there
is also nothing beyond the picture
which you can see. As you watch
the picture and begin to notice
more, the nothing grows less, but
never less than nothing. For you,
the picture has no separate
being, and, like you, the
nothing in the picture exists.
As a child, we learn to see a ball, a tree,
a dog, sitting at the moment.
The dog knows little of our confusion, and
yet calms us with her eyes.
Mono No Aware
I don’t know just when it
caught up to be with me. Maybe
it had been gathering, always, like
dust and only now accruing enough
weight to become a presence, as
if the experience of my lifetime
had been hooked-up as a team
alongside my present, every step,
playing to the moment of my being
like a lenticular cloud or a nugget
of clear amber, some beacon of delight
within the sadness of things, a silent,
second actor in
every closely watched scene.
Presence
Something about the brush pile
thirty yards ahead beside the two-
track through the aspen grove,
something too dark, too dense, as
if the glance of a witch
in wait—something out of place.
I whispered the dogs to sit and stay
and held my hand, palm
down, between them to
give my command more weight.
My first thought, always, was of bear. I’ve
followed the trail of ripped-open
sheepskins, scattered like
piles of bloody popcorn, when
the Basque herders bring
their flocks down from the
mountain pastures
in this late part of summer.
We waited, and the obscure shape
swayed, though not as if in wind.
There was no wind,
only caution becoming fear as
whatever it was rocked
back and forth four times,
building momentum to rise like
a mountain through geologic time, its
murky ridges spreading high against
the pale green of the aspens with
branches of its own, more massive
than these slender trees could take,
and under them,
two black-silver beads, in sunlight blacker
than the darkness they shone out of, sensing
something about our being there.
I felt the dogs quiver, or
maybe it was me.
I wondered how the moose might
see us, three frozen beings pretending
to be small trees or shrubs, pretending
not to breathe, waiting
for him to decide if we were
a threat worth being threatened by.
I thought of our neighbor, the blacksmith,
Johnny Reddan, stomped to death
the summer before, out for a short walk
after supper, told his wife
he’d be back before dark.
They found his body the following noon,
a cow with calves, the ranger
said, it must have been a cow. I heard
an airplane sounding angry above
the trees, then it relented to a hard-
edged hum and hummed on
for several minutes, it seemed.
I heard then the kyrie of a red-tail hawk
and wondered what she might be
seeing of our standoff
in this rivery break of ranch road
through the trees. Two
years before a herd of thirteen
moose, five cows and eight
lumbering bulls, spent an idle Christmas
on our snow-covered lawn, rubbing
on the clapboards of the house, nudging
the drift boat on its trailer, locking
antlers, aimlessly pushing each other
around, with no agenda. It seemed
so safe with the solid walls
around us, smiling at
the mangy pelts and
homely mugs, that docile
consciousness at play.
Time was all around us now, meaning
one more siphoned breath of
the air the moose was breathing too.
I wondered if he could smell us—nothing
moving anywhere
A fly buzzed by my ear.
Was the bull waiting
for us to break the spell?
His moosness was implacable,
the light behind him from the trees.
Eight miles south in the town of Driggs,
Deb was at the Safeway for tomatoes,
lettuce, bacon, and bread, expecting
I’d be home for lunch.
The dogs were so still I almost
forgot them, their noses locked
on the moose like
pointers on a grouse.
I scanned the grove for a gap
between two slender trunks,
just wide enough for me.
And then there was a breeze.
The grass heads nodded.
A sudden flutter through
the leathery leaves—one breath
was all, as tentative
as our own. It seemed
enough to move the scene.
The bull swayed again
and swung himself one step into the forest
and then another. We heard
dry branches whisper and snap
as he plowed his way,
a primeval wave of mid-day
darkness through the fragile trees.
The dogs stayed close the last
quarter mile through the aspens
till the track opened out onto a prairie
of scrubby sage and yellow arrowroot.
After Dinner
It was when I stepped out
to take a leak and was noticing
how many branches of the sheltering
oaks were invading the eaves and needed
to be cut back, that the hawk, a falcon
in fact, flashed from the green entanglements
to a roof tile not five feet above
my eye. The air went missing and everything
I might have sensed moving fled
with my breath under the quick
solemn snap roll glances of this compact
new lord of impending night, honoring me,
I took it that way, my heartbeat
chanting thank you, thank you, thank you, without quite
caring who you was.
Other
When I had yet to learn the nature
of words, I had no sense
the trees and animals
I walked among were something
I was not.
Only when I saw
the swallow fly into the glass
of the window I was
watching through,
and picked it up,
and felt its life struggle
to get back inside,
as its eyes closed
and its head shook
and my hand felt its body
cool and become
a thing somewhere
beyond a glass
that wouldn’t let me through.
