Last century we took a lot of shots Of what we did, framing things for Look and Life So we could see us and our lot
You don’t know the forest of two minds bound by weeds grown from one to the other,
Life’s on the wire; The rest is waiting. I know I’m alive when I
Dawn boils up like milk, cloudy with disrespect. Like Tin Pan Alley hacks, paid for each line, neighborhood wrens bang out their high-pitched notes.
Winter at the end of the trail, where the Columbia washes the ocean, what one book calls The Kingdom of Conifers,
This pain is so familiar (we were all children once) I let it ride my back. I offer it in,
It’s coming to you live: the high-rise ledge That doubles as a desolate precipice In a pinch. It’s all raw footage,
Once he looked deep in her muddy brown eyes and saw nothing there but the whirling flies.
We tell the story every year— how we peered from the windows, shades drawn— though nothing really happened, the charred grass now green again.
Landscape was never a subject matter, it was a technique, A method of measure, a scaffold for structuring. I stole its silences, I stepped to its hue and cry.
