Musings

Sign for a Tree

As I rounded the bend on the trail up Sonoma Mountain, I read the sign:

“TRAIL CLOSED AHEAD DUE TO TREE FAILURE”

I stood and meditated on its implications.

By its logic, the gracefully shaped brown nuts scattered on the trail must have resulted from acorn stem failure.
The lovely medallions of yellow and orange on the ground were the result of leaf atrophy.
The blue feather of a Stellar’s Jay, lying on a bed of fallen redwood needles, was the consequence of plumage dislocation.
The bleached bones of the opossum lying in the dry grass of the meadow were the result of insufficient coyote evasion.
And the mountain upon whose flanks I walked was the result of a fault.

It seemed to me that the tree’s passing merited a different sign:

“At the kink in the trail ahead, you will circumambulate the remains of a tall tanbark oak which from a pretty acorn grew, many decades ago.  For years of seasons, wet and dry, it lifted branches and serrated leaves skyward, communing with sun and wind.  Old and full of days, it died with flourish, dropping in one grand whoosh to the ground.  Walk around it and wonder.  May your footsteps be prayers of thanksgiving for its life.  And may this kink in the trail remain as a memorial to it, long after its trunk crumbles into rich forest soil.”

Further Oddservations

My job as a minister is to listen people into life.

 

You are the beauty that you see.

 

Dignity or bread:
don’t make me choose!

Riding the bus,
I consider the drivers
of the passing cars,
and imagine the poems
they aren’t writing now.

What matters most:
freedom to
or
freedom from?

These days, time with my old friend
runs backward
nearly as fast as it
moves forward.
For us,
now gets longer.

 

What makes a noun proper?
Could it be the same thing that
makes a verb tense?

She got sick of being a patient,
but there’s no doctor for that disease.

The tongue remembers
the evening light
on the mountain vineyard
the texture of dirt between rows
the colors of the turning leaves at harvest
the grapes that the wine forgot.

The nose recollects
the distant silos
beyond the sea of sighing stalks
the sight of a thunderhead
boiling over golden fields
the grain the baking bread forgot.

Passenger on an airliner,
I gaze down through the little window
at three hundred miles of desert,
and feel myself walking away,
as if forever,
around the hoodoos,
along the rims,
over the naked mountains,
into the snaking canyons,
along the slim, silvery rivers;
just listening to wind,
to the crunch of rough dirt underfoot,
from day into night.
I feel my back leaning against a red cliff
while a mesquite campfire
spits sparks spaceward,
thickening the Milky Way, that
jet trail of a whirling cosmos.

What hunger fixes my eyes
on that high ridge of serrated stone?
How do my feet find their own way
around the rocks on the trail?
Who reversed gravity?
What pulls me by the heart
up this mountain switchback?

Still trying
and failing
to explain
why I have to climb Atalaya Mountain
whenever I go to northern New Mexico.

How many pilgrims, whispering prayers,
would it take,
and for how long,
if they carried sanctified stones
and laid them on top of each other
to make you, O mountain?
Here is my stone.

The best thing about
this enormous thundercloud,
swelling against the ceiling of the sky,
its heart beating with shrouded pulses of light
and muffled booms of sound,
its billows glowing purple, pink, and orange,
its moisture dropping in dark sheets
onto the shadowed mountain,
is that it isn’t about how I see it.

Language has its limi

 

I don't know my friend.

I know of him;

this cherished one

who allures me with

urgent curiosity.

 

I know of love,

but love I know no more

nor less

than an unborn child

knows its mother.

 

The peacock spread his feathers

and then pecked

for grubs in the dirt.

Am I any better at humility

than he is?

 

Can you give me freedom?

I doubt I can give it to you.

 

Too often the bread of charity

is baked in the shape of chains.

 

But the aroma of justice

makes the heart hungry.

Blessed starvation!

 

I gave you bread.

You ate.

Not it!

 

You broke my heart:

and truth fell out

instead of spare change.

 

This wine got drunk with me.

Oh, that was a good year!

 

God: a wonderful friend,

but a troublesome concept.

 

On my night hike,

a coyote stared at me.

Dinner? her eyes asked.

God? asked mine.

 

If I own

what you owe

I’ll reap

what you sow.

 

Dirt is made from stones.

Stones are made of dirt.

Which came first?

I ask, as I walk on stone,

grinding it to dirt;

as I walk on dirt,

pounding it to stone.

 

Which came first?

The bird didn’t ask,

nor did its egg.

What don’t they know

that I should not know?