Ansel Adams
A mass of fractured granite flattened by the moon--
This winter evening looks like night.
We know the monolith is Half Dome rising.
The stillness in the photograph is not quiet;
It moves as the snowy clouds slow down,
Awake in a clinging arch of trees.
Yet we are made of igneous muscle,
Metamorphic brain and sedimentary fat.
Hunger, abstract as rock,
Blinds our vision.
We can't let go.
Still we place our hope in photographs and fictions:
The meticulous eye, the careful wait,
The perilous exposure and slow development
Are lenses through rocks, through light itself,
By degrees of gray, inward
To the mind.
Thank God for Polaroid;
Its stock may rise before our fall.
It may teach us to watch
Until our bodies wake.
from Piedras (1978)
To David Maxim, After Seeing His Himalayas
Two continents collided to raise these icy rocks
Almost thirty thousand feet above the sea.
We know all that from glacial records:
India slipped away from Antarctic cold
To touch warm Asia, then kept on moving,
Folding the Earth, thrusting it upwards,
To bring us closer to a cloudy Heaven,
To build colder mountains for Tibetan monks.
Now, ages later, you touch paint to canvas.
You remind us of our earthly powers.
Oils form faults and fissures, hazardous crevasses,
Layer on layer, brushes and scrapes.
Cliffs rise toward the sky
And time slows down.
You do it all with colors.
They float through our warm eyes
To collide with mental patterns
Larger than cold mountains.
This is a kind of knowing,
A way for us to see things new.
from Piedras (1978)
With Karla and Susan After Visiting an Exhibition
of Judy Chicago's Work
Here is an opening,
a major pair of lips,
to kiss and to
grow from.
Wrapped as they are
and shut in a box,
we can sense multiplicity
as hands and flowers
reaching out to pollinate
plants like our own.
What stands for us now
and enters this sheath
can never be the same
bone.
There's no more sower and sown.
We're all teeming earth
with wide mouths
and strenuous tongues
singing to be free.
from Piedras (1978)
Feux D'Artifice
Lights--
green, red, violet, white, blue--
shine in the north sky,
open their dazzling eyes
in wide circles;
then, failing to dilate further,
fall back into darkness.
Sounds
come to us later--
the snorting of cannon fire,
or the hissing and fuming of dragons
speaking to distant hills.
Standing here in the night,
we keep warm by our own fires,
feux d'artifices,
insatiable desires
for vaster worlds--
the bloom of our flesh,
our noisy empires,
the explosion and sigh of fictions, planets,
the darkening stars.
from Piedras (1978)
Minimum Impact
Where lupines, larkspurs, cinque and avalanche lilies
Cluster near heather, paintbrush and short fir trees,
We learn to walk more gently,
Take the path others have taken,
Never camp.
For this is a new zone we have come to:
Like wilted Alaska cedars mixing with the firs,
We have escaped the clear-cut hills below us
To face long winter
And summer to brief for waste. from Piedras (1978),
first published in Transactions of the Pacific Circle (Fall, 1975)
The Edward Curtis "Last Views"
Beyond the darkness
and the occasional fuzziness
of the photographs
of Comanche, Yakima,
Lummi, Flathead and Sioux,
There is a red-orange tinge
almost like sunset
on winter afternoons.
I feel the lives
struggling fiercely in the old ways--
Geronimo blanketed against cold,
tepees raised within the forests,
painted warriors,
fishers and hunters,
women collecting wood in the snow.
These people look beyond
the shadow in the camera.
They know this kiss of death
is painful but not lasting.
They have implacable eyes.
What we call wrinkles on their faces--
like canoes of stretched elk-skin
on strong fir-saplings--
are the markings
of spirits still living among us.
And what seem like grim symbols--
eagle feathers, weasel and deer skins,
bone and grizzly-claw necklaces--
express an integrity
we find we need. from Piedras (1978)