Friday Market, Nelson

Here's a street fair in summer,
White and blue canvas kiosks
Under an after-rain sun,
Homemade goods, organic foods
From local farming co-ops,
Amplified drumming thumping
Under Canadian flags.

The evening's too beguiling
For rhetoric to save me.
I'm not the sort to name names
As if naming could conjure
The irreducible world.
When I'm done naming something
There's only the name to see--

Hemp, bouquets, dreadlocks, tattoos,
Strollers, chinos, wet pavement--
Which details are important
Enough to suggest the heft
Of everything not mentioned,
Which details earn forgiveness
For painting nothing but names?

Pastoral

Bits of tree cotton drift
Lightly as jellyfish
In the dry mountain air,

White parachutes without
Warriors, snow without cold,
Angels outside of faith.

Chickadees, nuthatches
Siskins, robins, and crows
Overlay choruses

On those of the insects,
Of cotton-carrying
Breezes, of porcelain chimes

Hanging in the high sun
Over the creek and lake,
And there's nothing to say.

Blue Window

Enough of the fog green and moss grey
Thinks the garbage collector as he stomps around
The cabin on his self-appointed rounds.
No one local needs to be told the local weather anyway.

The day goes as it goes,
Not as he or anyone wills it, not just,
But it's hardly a total bust.
The vicissitudes keep him on his toes.

The collector sorts recyclables, phrases
With enough pith left that it's puzzling
They're so lightly tossed, no ideas about the thing,
Not even the thing itself, just the bit that amazes.

At the end, or nearly, when a pink sun
Decorates the blue windows, and the trees
Hum in chorus, hoarse angels happy for a breeze,
The light is dreamy and the garbage collection is done.

The Cliff Dweller

One of the ridiculous pleasures
Of flirting with disaster is that,
Having yet once more skirted the worst,
One feels inclined to kick up one's heels
And caper about delightedly
Because everything, briefly, seems easy.

Is it raining? How magnificent,
The world's more magical for the mist.
Are there too many bills overdue?
What an accomplishment to post them!
Does the body continue to ache?
How delightful, it aches less and less!

Does one seek out the rim of the cliff
On good days in hopes of feeling fright
Enough to trigger genuine glee?
This cabin's on a cliff, high in mists
On a wet, green summer afternoon,
Rain syncopating the cabin roof,

Sarah's soup simmering on the stove,
My thoughts full of their own cleverness,
My curdled corporeality
Curled up on a comfortable sofa
Like an old tomcat, self contented,
And this world is good enough for me.

Conceptual

Life begins within life begins
Within life begins within in life.
By your father's count, Sequoia,
You're reaching your third beginning,

The first since birth, the second since
Conception, counting only those
Transitions involving a new
Being, new thing in existence.

This time you're conceiving yourself,
You're emerging as a human.
The imaginary glimmers now,
Like a distant star approaching.

As you put your dolly to bed
And feed your plastic toys their snacks
And mime eating with a big grin,
Your life as a theorist begins.

I'm as spooked as fascinated.
All the favorite folk exemplars--
Caterpillars, tadpoles, acorns--
Inadequate analogies

For the transformation of flesh
Into ideas about the world.
Your soul, whatever it isn't,
Announces its mystery now.

You can't see it yet, but I can.
The day will come when you know it,
When you know yourself as a self.
Then the real wondering begins.

For Yvonne Gilmore, With Mixed Results

The reason real life is boring
Has nothing to do with what
Doesn't happen but what does,
The way it does, all mixed up,
Good and bad, cheerful and sad.
The soberest existence
Executes a drunkard's walk

That sprawls in all directions
And shuffles muddied patterns.
Have you seen the cosmic map
Of background radiation
Foolhardy astronomers
Dubbed the "face of God"? A mess
Of blotches, spots, and splotches.

We like our stories in arcs
And wheels, starting and stopping
At points of loss or success.
We don't like a random mess,
We recoil from randomness,
And that is why we suffer.
We don't want the world we're in,

Perhaps because, per Darwin,
Beasts who need the stars pretty,
Babies stupendous, and life
Full of meaning outcompete
Kinfolk who demand nothing
Beyond what they find. Perhaps,
But why hunger for meaning?

Whyever it is, we do,
And that leaves each with a choice
To pace our cages growling
Or try to pick out the locks,
And it seems there are only
Two directions we can spin:
Surrender or denial.

Accept what is as it is
Or insist that it isn't,
That a plan, invisible
At any moment governs
All--two plans in fact, cosmic
And personal, everything
In one, me in the other.

Both choices are perilous,
Narrow paths that tend to slide
Over and into others,
And we can't stick to a plan
Anymore than the world can.
Those who choose calm surrender
See meaning glowing in it,

And those who choose God's rule
Find themselves surrendering,
And so we're back to random
Daily moments of wisdom,
Moments of doubt and despair,
Alternating chummily
As fortunes in a market.

Just yesterday, for instance,
After a reasonably
Harrowing weekend journey
Through the pleasures of limbo
In a dullard's Idaho,
I drove past the most ornate
Roadside cross memorial

I have ever come across,
An arc of sumptuous purple
Flowers over a garlanded
White cross in a flower bed
With the name, "Yvonne Gilmore"
Painted across the arm bars
In thick, black calligraphy.

Yvonne, this poem is for those
Who lavished their bereavement
At your last intersection
Between real and imagined,
And for their story of you
And your life's meaning, and for
All who pass by, and for you.

The Time, the Money, and the Weather

What is this impossible
Configuration of links
Between the way everything
Contributes to everything
Becoming nothing like what
Anything contributed.

Here is a lake infested
With houses, shallow and small,
Ringed by puny, bumpy hills
Forested by various
Stages of recovery
From the nearby paper mills.

And here are rented cabins
In a cluster on one shore
Where we never intended
To spend any time, much less
A night, then a whole weekend,
Getting to know the owners,

One of whom dreams of selling
A lurid, sprawling novel
About Cajun swill smugglers
During the prohibition,
Both of whom tell us about
Their recent car accident.

Combinations of notions,
Hesitations, decisions
Appeared to have led us here,
But our deliberations
Couldn't have mattered that much,
Correctly guessing nothing,

Not what these days would be like,
Not the strange bed, the quiet,
The midnight drive through the fog
To get to the hospital in time
To stop anaphylaxis,
The boat ride around the lake

The next day, our daughter's first
Time in a boat, with the couple
From Spokane in the cabin
Next to ours, who decided
On a whim to weekend here,
So they could take their boat out--

Patty and her wife Becca,
A fifty-something fireplug
And a zaftig nurse in braids,
With a cooler full of beer,
A scruffy, palm-sized rat dog,
And a lot of cheerful talk

About nothing. A weekend
Conjured out of a million
Little fears and fantasies,
Ill health, strained budgets, desires,
Giant universal laws,
Subatomic particles.

Can of beer and cigarette
In one hand, her other hand 
Piloting the boat, Patty
Explains how rarely she gets
The boat out. "You need the time,
The money, and the weather."