Thursday, 1/17/2013

           without rudder, waking slowly

thankful for it
        brief warmth "don't get used to it"
        neighbor's dog in her yard; bit of 
        sunshine, old comforter

Arrived Big Basin 2:30, drippy chill
under redwoods, giants seeded 
before the Mayans
        before Mohammed, or Lapu Lapu
                   and any of our ways
burned east or west.
                         we look up and up

then down; the tiniest of mushrooms
              delicate stand on the bark's
     slow cascade

"forever alive"

   up north, they say, Yurok houses, "living beings"
sunk into earth warmth

Distracted by this sodden world,
getting late

but you take my photo
standing at the end of the bridge
Turned my head a little to the right
pretended to look at a fern

Boulder Creek, Bonny Doon
           (decades earlier we'd
go to buy acid), Henfling's
and the old community park
Felton's, Don Quixote's

         details vanish, although
         the scent of woods, a vacant
         lot, sign, might recall

with imagined precision the rough track
leading up to a cabin
                    on Ice Cream Grade

or cement walk leading to my parent's
         house--Trinidad, Nick--
         the lemon tree, plaster cracked

Because time is a constant
or because time does not exist

because daily I awake
and lay me down to sleep

what does it matter
to sempervirens

Random lines from my bookshelf:

"I cooked it for dinner, and spent the next couple days
with both ends open, delirious. It was a jack o' lantern 
that I ate, and I'm glad I did because it humbled me." 

-- Simon Kelly, "My First Mushroom Hunt," 
in All That the Rain Promises, and More, by David Arora.