.
Woodland hills of Bolinas Ridge west of the summit of Mount Tamalpais: photo by Hydrogen Iodide, 25 November 2005
Like a big tired buffalo
or ox
Mount Tam kneels beneath
a glittering ceiling
her blue and green
flanks rest, her shaggy
head settles
and drinks from the lagoon.
The fur of her underbelly is burnt and brown
cars wind down it
like ticks. The top
of her head is yellow and balding
except where a few squiggly redwood tips
crest it. She rests, in the blazing
light of a June afternoon, as I do.
Life is not conditional. IF
is only a
half-life.
A whole life –- yours, mine, anyone's –-
can pass by in an instant. Hers
continues, like a music without notes,
unless you really strain
your ears to hear them, and maybe even then.
Dying pine tree near the summit of Mount Tamalpais: photo by Hydrogen Iodide, 25 November 2005
14 comments:
What an extraordinarily natural and touching tribute to a natural place. It doesn't so much take my breath away as restore it to its proper place.
Life is not conditional. IF
is only a
half-life.
That's just what I was thinking yesterday -- or something like it.
I'm always amazed to find an artifact that must have caused its creator a great deal of effort to bring into being seem to belong to the world so inevitably, so naturally.
"and maybe even then."
Fine, fine, Tom. Thanks.
Many thanks, my friends.
I love the idea of one's breath being restored to its proper place. In a rather fraught time here, sleeping and breathing have lately seemed like fugitives, fled beyond pursuit.
But when I look at this poem and photos and the memories they evoke, my breath, too -- to redeploy your apt phrase, Curtis -- is restored to its proper place (even though the "actual" place is for us now forever buried in the enchanting out-of-focus paperweight blizzard-swirl of the long-ago...)
I found reading Madre (Life Notes) particularly therapeutic in view of my ongoing "dislocation" problem. A friend of mine who is a Pilates instructor once told my wife that, although she thought I had some admirable qualities, I had no idea whatsoever "where I was in space." She also, like others before and after her (including doctors at various times), continually had to remind me to breathe. Madre (Life Notes) breathed life into the room and into me.
Tom,
Great to see the mountain here (and just up there!), hear these notes. . . .
9.20
first grey light in sky above blackness
of ridge, moon above planet in branches
in foreground, sound of wave in channel
“more elaborated,” position
of space in more that
not far from it, what would
be called, becomes it
silver of low sun reflected in channel,
cormorant flapping across toward point
that top photo is def
innately Mother !
maybe "her" as buffalo
"rent" in the fore
and the resting tine breasts
up on the right
I am thinking of that American Indian mythological
(as I recall) the mother of all life (Earth) that White Buffalo ?
I too
was up all night tossing things in mind
and practicing breathings
that rut in that mountain precisely
& the silence
http://www.powersource.com/gallery/whiteb.html
I didn't make up that White Buffalo myth ... it is
a Lakota beliefe and
well ... let us all smoke that .... pipe...
what's that old saying?
"put this in your pipe and smoke it"
and that old ditty"
"Buffalo Girl won't you come
home tonight come home tonight
come home tonight and
dance by the light of the Moon?"
and here i thought living a life was nothing but conditions and all this liquid ifs meeting made me. but i do love that line sir.
gamefaced,
and here i thought living a life was nothing but conditions and all this liquid ifs meeting made me.
I think I think that thought too now, every totally conditional night.
Then, now.
This poem dates back archeologically forty years, to a daylight dreamed real or stab-in-the-dark reality dream maybe not quite so totally conditional... anyway another place, another time.
The period of dirt roads and family subsistence on under $1000 a year and feeling lucky at that.
Still remember writing it, sitting inside a small homemade outdoor hutch constructed of carpet scrap and cinder blocks, with a corrugated plastic roof, looking up through the summer haze to that great bison mother mountain.
She seemed like our friend.
She has endured a lot. Now she looks down on designer clothing brand owners and movie directors and oenologists and weekending imperial gourmet queens.
And does she care?
Ed,
I didn't make up that White Buffalo myth ...
and neither did Pawnee Bill.
Places like Mt. Tam - and the Black Hills and Rocky Mountains - give us that one chance in today's world to breathe, to be alone, to touch the face of something so much greater and larger than we are.
way back in the day me and Jamie Brownlow
long about 1974 or so
camped out in The Badlands The Black Hills
South Dakota
and
I am telling you ... it was like being on the moon !
Jamie and I were on the way back from California
to check on his family
who were in that huge flood that wiped out his family's town..
I forget the name of the town..
Jamie was )is) part Indian as I recall OGALOOGA
(Sioux ?)
and while camping we cut our thumbs and exchanged blood
Marcia... I like to think that there are some things/places left ..... virginal
now to see if I can find the name of that town and the flood
I once walked the trail around the base of Devil's Tower. You can see out over the ridges and grasslands of the Black Hills stretching away for what seems like a hundred miles. When that was Indian country, it was possible to look out over a great wandering sea of Bison, from that sacred spot.
Beautiful, Tom. I love the warning yet I also think "can pass by in an instant" is misleading - every life passes by in an instant whether we like it or not. Iggiz told me that once, and I believe it, right or wrong. Where are we? Sometimes when I close my eyes it's the same as when they are open and that makes me wonder.
Iggiz, he knew.
Sometimes when I close my eyes I wonder if I will ever open them again.
To sleep, perchance to dream... 'twould be bueno.
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