Lew Welch

for Gary Snyder “I think I’ll be the Buddha of this place” and sat himself down 1. It’s a real rock (believe this first) Resting on actual sand at the surf’s edge: Muir Beach, California (like everything else I have somebody showed it to me and I found it by myself) Hard common stone Size of the largest haystack It moves when hit by waves Actually shudders (even a good gust of wind will do it if you sit real still and keep your mouth shut) Notched to certain center it Yields and then comes back to it: Wobbly tons 2. Sitting here you look below to other rocks Precisely placed as rocks of Ryoanji: Foam like swept stones (the mind getting it all confused again: “snow like frosting on a cake” “rose so beautiful it don’t look real”) Isn’t there a clear example here Stone garden shown to me by Berkeley painter I never met A thousand books and somebody else’s boatride ROCKS (garden) EYE (nearly empty despite this clutter-image all the opposites cancelling out a CIRCULAR process:Frosting-snow) Or think of the monks who made it 4 hundred 50 years ago Lugged the boulders from the sea Swept to foam original gravelstone from sea (first saw it, even then, when finally they all looked up the instant AFTER it was made) And now all rocks are different and All the spaces in between (which includes about everything) The instant After it is made 3. I have been in many shapes before I attained congenial form All those years on the beach, lifetimes . . . When I was a boy I used to watch the Pelican: It always seemed his wings broke And he dropped, like scissors, in the sea . . . Night fire flicking the shale cliff Balls tight as a cat after the cold swim Her young snatch sandy . . . I have travelled I have made a circuit I have lived in 14 cities I have been a word in a book I have been a book originally Dychymig Dychymig:(riddle me a riddle) Waves and the sea. If you take away the sea Tell me what it is 4. Yesterday the weather was nice there were lots of people Today it rains, the only other figure is far up the beach (by the curve of his body I know he leans against the tug of his fishingline: there is no separation) Yesterday they gathered and broke gathered and broke like Feeding swallows dipped down to pick up something ran back to Show it And a young girl with jeans rolled to mid-thigh ran Splashing in the rain creek “They’re all so damned happy— why can’t they admit it?” Easy enough until a little rain shuts beaches down . . . Did it mean nothing to you Animal that turns this Planet to a smoky rock? Back among your quarrels How can I remind you of your gentleness? Jeans are washed Shells all lost or broken Driftwood sits in shadow boxes on a tracthouse wall Like swallows you were, gathering Like people I wish for . . . cannot even tell this to that fisherman 5. 3 of us in a boat the size of a bathtub   .   pitching in slow waves   .   fish poles over the side   .   oars We rounded a point of rock and entered a small cove Below us: fronds of kelp fish crustaceans eels Then us then rocks at the cliff’s base starfish (hundreds of them sunning themselves) final starfish on the highest rock then Cliff 4 feet up the cliff a flower grass further up more grass grass over the cliff’s edge branch of pine then Far up the sky a hawk Clutching to our chip we are jittering in a spectrum Hung in the film of this narrow band Green to our eyes only 6. On a trail not far from here Walking in meditation We entered a dark grove And I lost all separation in step with the Eucalyptus as the trail walked back beneath me Does it need to be that dark or is Darkness only its occasion Finding it by ourselves knowing Of course Somebody else was there before . . . I like playing that game Standing on a high rock looking way out over it all: “I think I’ll call it the Pacific” Wind water Wave rock Sea sand (there is no separation) Wind that wets my lips is salt Sea breaking within me balanced as the Sea that floods these rocks. Rock Returning to the sea, easily, as Sea once rose from it. It Is a sea rock (easily) I am Rocked by the sea

All these years I overlooked them in the racket of the rest, this symbiotic splash of plant and fungus feeding on rock, on sun, a little moisture, air — tiny acid-factories dissolving salt from living rocks and eating them. Here they are, blooming! Trail rock, talus and scree, all dusted with it: rust, ivory, brilliant yellow-green, and cliffs like murals! Huge panels streaked and patched, quietly with shooting-stars and lupine at the base. Closer, with the glass, a city of cups! Clumps of mushrooms and where do the plants begin? Why are they doing this? In this big sky and all around me peaks & the melting glaciers, why am I made to kneel and peer at Tiny? These are the stamps of the final envelope. How can the poisons reach them? In such thin air, how can they care for the loss of a million breaths? What, possibly, could make their ground more bare? Let it all die. The hushed globe will wait and wait for what is now so small and slow to open it again. As now, indeed, it opens it again, this scentless velvet, crumbler-of-the-rocks, this Lichen!

I saw myself a ring of bone in the clear stream of all of it and vowed, always to be open to it that all of it might flow through and then heard “ring of bone” where ring is what a bell does

Whenever I have a day off, I write a new poem. Does this mean you shouldn’t work, or that you write best on your day off? For example, this is the poem I wrote today. * When he was 20, he understood some of the secrets of life, and undertook to write them down so simply that even an idiot could understand. “For,” he reasoned, “if I can’t do that, I don’t understand it myself.” He proved himself right. When he was 50, he didn’t understand it himself. * “Why is it,” he said, “that no matter what you say, a woman always takes it personally?” “I never do,” she said. * John said, “Then I met that short fat guy with the neat little beard, with a name like dawn.” “You mean George Abend?” “Yeah.” “Abend means evening.” *

I lived here nearly 5 years before I could meet the middle western day with anything approaching Dignity. It’s a place that lets you understand why the Bible is the way it is: Proud people cannot live here. The land’s too flat. Ugly sullen and big it pounds men down past humbleness. They Stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and terrible sky. In country like this there Can be no God but Jahweh. In the mills and refineries of its south side Chicago passes its natural gas in flames Bouncing like bunsens from stacks a hundred feet high. The stench stabs at your eyeballs. The whole sky green and yellow backdrop for the skeleton steel of a bombed-out town. Remember the movies in grammar school? The goggled men doing strong things in Showers of steel-spark? The dark screen cracking light and the furnace door opening with a Blast of orange like a sunset? Or an orange? It was photographed by a fairy, thrilled as a girl, or a Nazi who wished there were people Behind that door (hence the remote beauty), but Sievers, whose old man spent most of his life in there, Remembers a “nigger in a red T-shirt pissing into the black sand.” It was 5 years until I could afford to recognize the ferocity. Friends helped me. Then I put some Love into my house. Finally I found some quiet lakes and a farm where they let me shoot pheasant. Standing in the boat one night I watched the lake go absolutely flat. Smaller than raindrops, and only Here and there, the feeding rings of fish were visible a hundred yards away — and the Blue Gill caught that afternoon Lifted from its northern lake like a tropical! Jewel at its ear Belly gold so bright you’d swear he had a Light in there. His color faded with his life. A small green fish . . . All things considered, it’s a gentle and undemanding planet, even here. Far gentler Here than any of a dozen other places. The trouble is always and only with what we build on top of it. There’s nobody else to blame. You can’t fix it and you can’t make it go away. It does no good appealing To some ill-invented Thunderer Brooding above some unimaginable crag . . . It’s ours. Right down to the last small hinge it all depends for its existence Only and utterly upon our sufferance. Driving back I saw Chicago rising in its gases and I knew again that never will the Man be made to stand against this pitiless, unparalleled monstrocity. It Snuffles on the beach of its Great Lake like a blind, red, rhinoceros. It’s already running us down. You can’t fix it. You can’t make it go away. I don’t know what you’re going to do about it, But I know what I’m going to do about it. I’m just going to walk away from it. Maybe A small part of it will die if I’m not around feeding it anymore.