AFTER THE CONFERENCE, SHELL BEACH
Take the path to water.
Curved beach and warm sand invite.
Let the others drink and weep. Your heart
is large today - enough
to comfort them in crossing oceans
if they should set out in boats. The arching palms
along this slope to the beach have thoughts
for sea birds that flock like hundreds of ribbons
scattered down the sky. Sky and bird and tree,
a family. Their motions, your own -
and thoughts lift into finger-paint swirls,
the yellow-red clouds some great one
placed against the blue. Toward the quiet of night
where you reach in strong meditation,
a leafy path to three oceans. Watch the molten rock
rise, jewels from the deeper ridges.
. . .
PICTURE WINDOW
Poetry smiles but not
with a face. Poet in a room,
happy with his piece of paper
that can see a stream tumbling on
under salmonberry - the dull red fruit.
Anywhere.
Hold the paper to the light.
Laid paper
with translucent design
will urge and ask,
"Why not call these fruits and leaves
constellations -
as the blue and black jays land,
touched with white? And why not
call them riders of the only river?
The birds gone starry,
feeding in the prickly shrubs.
And inside the face of any flower,
so much fast water.
And many flowers with fragrance
and the raspberrylike fruit - there
out your picture window of paper!
Don't you beieve any minute
those scampering crows
will break into dance?"
. . .
CONTEMPLATION - NEW STARS AND DUST CLOUDS
No matter what, you can make deliberate actions.
On earth, walk awake. Eat and become awake.
Be a kind attention to all hours of the day.
Become amazed and grateful. Add the tremors of your love
to the world. (A small gesture will do,
one smuggled in from the beginning of things.)
Wish the fellow travelers well. Wish
with your eyes on the prairie and the roaring train.
Wish with the cocking of your head.
*
Dismantle forever the illusion of being apart.
Wear a body as love wears you - some days it's things like
flinging you into a closet like shirt or shoes, all life
being the one body - seen only by climbing a mountain barefoot.
Set out. What you will make in this time, this world that wants you
to go mad with that intention, to be
unreasonable with distracted men and fitful women.
Carve for them the things you expect to say - like,
The river runs forever. Confuse everyone. Fall off a ladder
so the divine master shakes his head and says, You could have flown!
You might as well be ecstatic since no one knows his answers
but you, and all ground is holy - except
where you destroy yourself by talk of fences and walls
when all this time there are dust clouds, holy in space.
New stars full of purpose, pressing themselves to life.
. . .
TERRAIN, PRE-DAWN
Walk out on the open land you imagine.
This high basin of meadows.
The silence of dark. Now for the birds -
Steller's jay, made for morning, that borderland
that stirs in time with coming storms and the bursts
inside the sun. The pine siskin appears, face
curious after the night's black sky. The bird body,
dark-streaked, the wings in pale yellows.
Now for sparrow and tanager -
fast rustlings of feathers and remembering;
fleeting reverence about winter feeding grounds,
ready love. And the time is right for you to say aloud,
"I act and speak for the sky, this rising day,
the final canopy of stars." Make up your mind
this day to study your own ray of sight,
carrier of eternal earth, your best study
till bright needles of light spin unexplained,
spin thread after thread down into the grasses,
every shoot beaded with its thousand living planets.
Each of those being your memory of the high basin.
Meadow and forest. And a record of your hikes,
guided by strangers through the day, through the sleeps
of ancient black bears, gatherings of raccoons,
glances of coyote. Embrace your power to go anywhere
the way natural creatures roam this land. Their looking -
in green eyes - reads the terrain thread on thread.
Copyright 1998 by Tim Bellows
