Change your life

 

You must unwind

your life-not quite what

William Stafford wrote

or spoke in Portland, or

what Rilke meant,

to start

a poem at lunch, write on

a paper plate, brush aside

crumbs in search of

ingredients for a new kind

of bread, morsels to feed

the spirit, and find pesto

left over from lunch.

Since the crash, it’s like that –

can’t concentrate on the task

at hand – until something

grabs my attention and then

it wants nothing but

the clearest water, the deepest

longing of the heart,

the highest mountain,

a red-orange sunset,

these images, figments

of purity, all of this

only preparation-

not the journey itself.

It is time to get up

and go. Now.

 

there.. once.

  

Milestone Basin

Following afternoon and burros uphill

through granite and gooseberry until

Brewer's lupine and lodgepole give way

to meadows and foxtail pine, the slopes

awash in corn lilies, mountain sorrel, blue

gentian and grass long and lush from snowmelt

and a week's rain, rivulet flows to ephemeral,

courses over earth, finds boulders, old channels,

crosses rock, cascades to whitewater and noise,

below, a Clark's nutcracker eviscerates nuts,

music turning to bursts of yellow, black, violet

shooting stars, long fingers of green, 

bouquets of paintbrush and columbine

ringed by purple-coned whitebark pine.

      

                            -ergo