BLACKBERRIES
Volume 3, Collected Poems, 2007
Preview
Published: The Cape Rock, Spring 1998
Blackberries
Packed in this segmented fruit is a kind of truth
peculiar to jellies and jams
and to the times
I ran through Oregon weather,
unleashed, in rain.
In those days, I believed in resurrection.
It was first when
we came back for a visit to the coast,
when you were just showing with our only child,
that I saw again
the sawmill village of my youth.
It was not the same,
and today I find myself asking
if we ever shared
enough parts of our fragmented lives
to assure a wine
dry and full as the blackberry wine
that we drank that day.
I find blackberries here in the store.
They don't ship well
and I'm forced to make do with the frozen.
Still they make good pies
and the truth drips to burn in the oven.
I extend my days from one berry season to the next.
I do not put store
in the promise of life after death.
I have tried that twice.
My life will contribute its flavor
when the fruit is ripe.
Inside The Mountain
To live inside the mountain takes more care.
There's darkness, always darkness.
Stairs are there, precipitous and steep, and places where
the stairs fall clean away.
Sometimes the heat built up in ancient fissures causes steam
and seams of coal to burn.
It takes more grace that earnings, faith than works, to damp
coal down.
And sometiems dig out gold and precious gems to bring up
to the surface,
sewn in hems, unpolished and uncut,
a thing we do to move beyond the boredom,
store up hope.
Or sit sometimes in darkness, absent dew,
beside dark flowing rivers,
sit to smoke and listen to the silence, earth's stark prayer,
and presuppose the answer.
There's the clink and clunk of blunt machines,
the dull drill's roar resounding in the walls
and, almost sore,
the strain on lungs to breathe.
Down here the score is always none to ten.
We find that more is something less than less.
there is the stress
of halls like hulls of ships we pump to drain.
The simple lack of light makes sense of smell
and touch of more importance.
Here the ear can feel as much as hear what we should know.
We're bound by life to listen.
It is well to notice walls that tremble, air that glows,
direction to the exit
and the slow pay out of breath like candy:
buy or sell.
but more important, darkness
and the fear it gathers to itself
and so preserves
creation like a book left on a shelf,
the pages still uncut, the binding sealed.
It is by trust we're healed,
by blindness cope down deep inside earth's crust,
here where the care of hope is simple habit:
that and prayer.