Your Little Death Pamphlet

It smells like cool slices of mountain,
Cantilevered, interlacing wood wings
Braced by the heavy arcs of streams
That root through flowering slopes

Artfully concealed by mats of clover,
Countless abandoned, minuscule
Fallen parachutes of cottoned pollen
And thick necklaces of leaves.

Hello

Early yesterday morning,
Leaving the lake villages,
I curled a shoreline switchback
Through firs and made eye contact
With a coyote peering
Over the old concrete berm
Like a front-row spectator.

I nearly waved in greeting
Then looked up at my rear view
To see lithe fur cross the road.
Veteran pedestrian
That one was, wise to machines,
Waiting for the way to clear,
A trickster myth with street smarts.

I'm bemused by the benign
Non conversation we shared,
Guessing how much religion,
Doubt, fairy tales, and visions
Stem from anticipating
A greeting that never comes
From something not one of us.

The Little Engine that Reasoned It Through

If you could shrink the whole planet
To the size of a billiard ball,
You would find the planet smoother
Than any billiard ball ever.

That's how flat our sphere really is,
Such featureless topography
There's no traction for a pool cue
When you dwindle right down to it.

And here's this peak in front of me,
Steep and scored by avalanches,
Appearing to fill the whole view,
Gorgeous, immense, and ominous.

How much is a trick of the eye?
How much my even smaller size?
How much due to flatlander views
Formed by zipping around the globe

Quickly enough to chase the night,
The way a dog chases a car
And returns home triumphantly
Having not gotten anywhere?

I'll go with being super small,
This mountain huge compared to me.
No cue from space will shoot this sphere.
What a foolish analogy.

"Never Drive a Car When You're Dead"

"It was the anonymity of the stories and the poems that went deepest into me. And the curl of a rhyme was something new."

"Tout le Gout,"
Something new
On the side of a Coke Zero can
For the anglophone American,

Mind of mush, chalk bones, heart half schmaltz, half cynic,
Driving himself down to the local clinic,
Bearing another old wound that won't heal,
Another green serpent stuck to his heel.

The clinic takes cash from the foreigner
And sits him down next to a coroner,
Retired, who says he speculates in gold
To pass the time now that he's grown too old

And ailing
For sailing.

A poet friend
Sits at the end

Of the row of chairs, spots him,
And comes to sit next to him.
She grins at him and bends her head, pert and lean.
"Are you in communion with your machine?"

She asks conspiratorially, as he pecks
With one finger at his phone, and thereby wrecks

His latest foolhardy attempt at rhyme.
He smiles, weakly. "Never rhyme time with rhyme,"
He jokes, but it's too late
In the day to play straight,

And he wonders why he tries so hard
To stay cheerful in the charnel yard.
All that gusto, what a waste
When zero cans all the taste.

Anthropoconfusion

What's progress for a lake?
It's not dammed. It's been here
For at least an ice age.
A few hundred people
Showed up a few thousand
Years ago. That was it

Until the silver boom
In the 1890s
Kicked off what's locally
Considered history.
An industrial lake
For a while then; steamships

Belched their coal stacks, hauling
Galena, silver, lead,
And logs from mushrooming
Villages boasting names
Such as El Dorado,
Silverton, New Denver,

All very picturesque
In photos, but a mess--
The carious mine shafts,
Stripped hillsides, early deaths,
The long-sunk ore ship
Still in the hold of the lake.

Then what? The long decline,
The Doukhobor settlers,
Japanese internees,
Hippies and their decline,
And now an afterthought
Summer vacation spot,

All mod cons, yet pristine,
The fresh yearly reports
The water's fit to drink,
The shoreline's not too bad,
The effluent minimal.
The lake falls and rises,

Turns over once a year.
It's all very boring,
Although this year it rose
To swallow the whole shore
And only now recedes.
"That's progress," Ranger Bob

Notes, seeing the water's down.
"There used to be a guy,
Maybe ninety years old,
Came every day at eight
To record the distance
Off from the jetty's edge

To the high water mark.
We rangers kept records
When he died. It hasn't
Gotten as high as this,
Not since the seventies."
He grins, gets in his truck

With Ranger Bruce to check
The state of hiking trails
Around Wilson Creek Falls.
I watch the small waves lap.
I want my beach. I want
The lake to eat us all.

Sucking Air

Life is maintenance, and so long
As you're busy with your errands,
You're alive and either keeping
Up, ahead, or more or less clean

And well- swept. You can try to shift
The dust onto someone other,
Make the renters water your plants,
Get your boyfriend to move the fridge,

Convince the dogs to lick your wounds,
But your cells have to clear themselves,
Your synapses have to stay linked,
And something has to love to breathe.

The Last Wolf Died When All Was Well

Really, no one can
Pronounce enjambment.
(You lie down in poem,
Tell the story
Staring up through trees.)

But we've got this thing
About prosody,
About altering
Natural rhythms
To cry "Poetry!"

It's okay. It's not dumb
To parse the banal,
To chop your phrases
At the kitchen sink,
And feel creative.

Still poems are still poems.
They don't need chanting
Like menus need French
And priests need Latin
To transform white bread.

Should high verse vanish
From moonlit forests
Our dreams will adapt,
As when there were wolves,
And now, coyotes.