Sourdough Mountain Lookout

Tsung Ping (375—443): "Now I am old and infirm. I fear I shall no more be able to roam among the beautiful mountains. Clarifying my mind, I meditate on the mountain trails and wander about only in dreams." -in The Spirit of the Brush, tr. by Shio Sakanishi, p. 34 for Kenneth Rexroth I always say I won't go back to the mountains I am too old and fat there are bugs mean mules And pancakes every morning of the world Mr. Edward Wyman (63) Steams along the trail ahead of us all Moaning, "My poor feet ache, my back Is tired and I've got a stiff prick" Uprooting alder shoots in the rain Then I'm alone in a glass house on a ridge Encircled by chiming mountains With one sun roaring through the house all day & the others crashing through the glass all night Conscious even while sleeping Morning fog in the southern gorge Gleaming foam restoring the old sea-level The lakes in two lights green soap and indigo The high cirque-lake black half-open eye Ptarmigan hunt for bugs in the snow Bear peers through the wall at noon Deer crowd up to see the lamp A mouse nearly drowns in the honey I see my bootprints mingle with deer-foot Bear-paw mule-shoe in the dusty path to the privy Much later I write down: "raging. Viking sunrise The gorgeous death of summer in the east!" (Influence of a Byronic landscape— Bent pages exhibiting depravity of style.) Outside the lookout I lay nude on the granite Mountain hot September sun but inside my head Calm dark night with all the other stars HERACLITUS: "The waking have one common world But the sleeping turn aside Each into a world of his own." I keep telling myself what I really like Are music, books, certain land and sea-scapes The way light falls across them, diffusion of Light through agate, light itself . . . I suppose I'm still afraid of the dark "Remember smart-guy there's something Bigger something smarter than you." Ireland's fear of unknown holies drives My father's voice (a country neither he Nor his great-grandfather ever saw) A sparkly tomb a plated grave A holy thumb beneath a wave Everything else they hauled across Atlantic Scattered and lost in the buffalo plains Among these trees and mountains From Duns Scotus to this page A thousand years (". . . a dog walking on this hind legs— not that he does it well but that he does it at all.") Virtually a blank except for the hypothesis That there is more to a man Than the contents of his jock-strap EMPEDOCLES: "At one time all the limbs Which are the body's portion are brought together By Love in blooming life's high season; at another Severed by cruel Strife, they wander each alone By the breakers of life's sea." Fire and pressure from the sun bear down Bear down centipede shadow of palm-frond A limestone lithograph—oysters and clams of stone Half a black rock bomb displaying brilliant crystals Fire and pressure Love and Strife bear down Brontosaurus, look away My sweat runs down the rock HERACLITUS: "The transformations of fire are, first of all, sea; and half of the sea is earth, half whirlwind. . . . It scatters and it gathers; it advances and retires." I move out of a sweaty pool (The sea!) And sit up higher on the rock Is anything burning? The sun itself! Dying Pooping out, exhausted Having produced brontosaurus, Heraclitus This rock, me, To no purpose I tell you anyway (as a kind of loving) . . . Flies & other insects come from miles around To listen I also address the rock, the heather, The alpine fir BUDDHA: "All the constituents of being are Transitory: Work out your salvation with diligence." (And everything, as one eminent disciple of that master Pointed out, had been tediously complex ever since.) There was a bird Lived in an egg And by ingenious chemistry Wrought molecules of albumen To beak and eye Gizzard and craw Feather and claw My grandmother said: "Look at them poor bed- raggled pigeons!" And the sign in McAlister Street: "IF YOU CAN'T COME IN SMILE AS YOU GO BY LOVE THE BUTCHER I destroy myself, the universe (an egg) And time—to get an answer: There are a smiler, a sleeper and a dancer We repeat the conversation in the glittering dark Floating beside the sleeper. The child remarks, "You knew it all the time." I: "I keep forgetting that the smiler is Sleeping; the sleeper, dancing." From Sauk Lookout two years before Some of the view was down the Skagit To Puget Sound: From above the lower ranges, Deep in the forest—lighthouses on clear nights. This year's rock is a spur from the main range Cuts the valley in two and is broken By the river; Ross Dam repairs the break, Makes trolley buses run Through the streets of dim Seattle far away. I'm surrounded by mountains here A circle of 108 beads, originally seeds of ficus religiosa Bo-Tree A circle, continuous, one odd bead Larger than the rest and bearing A tassel (hair-tuft) (the man who sat under the tree) In the center of the circle, a void, an empty figure containing All that's multiplied; Each bead a repetition, a world Of ignorance and sleep. Today is the day the goose gets cooked Day of liberation for the crumbling flower Knobcone pinecone in the flames Brandy in the sun Which, as I said, will disappear Anyway it'll be invisible soon Exchanging places with stars now in my head To be growing rice in China through the night. Magnetic storms across the solar plains Make Aurora Borealis shimmy bright Beyond the mountains to the north. Closing the lookout in the morning Thick ice on the shutters Coyote almost whistling on a nearby ridge The mountain is THERE (between two lakes) I brought back a piece of its rock Heavy dark-honey color With a seam of crystal, some of the quartz Stained by its matrix Practically indestructible A shift from opacity to brilliance (The Zenbos say, "Lightening-flash & flint-spark") Like the mountains where it was made What we see of the world is the mind's Invention and the mind Though stained by it, becoming Rivers, sun, mule-dung, flies— Can shift instantly A dirty bird in a square time Gone Gone REALLY gone Into the cool O MAMA! Like they say, "Four times up, Three times down." I'm still on the mountain.