Danger on Peaks Read Online Free

moraine of
    sand and summer snow and hardy flowers
    always combing the wind
    that crosses range and valley from the sea.
    Walk that backbone path
    ghosts of the pleistocene icefields
    stretching                  down and away,
    both sides

III

    Daily Life

W HAT TO T ELL , S TILL

    Reading the galley pages of Laughlin’s
Collected Poems
    with an eye to writing a comment.
    How warmly J speaks of Pound,
    I think back to —

    At twenty-three I sat in a lookout cabin in gray whipping wind
    at the north end of the northern Cascades,
    high above rocks and ice, wondering
    should I go visit Pound at St. Elizabeth’s?

    And studied Chinese in Berkeley, went to Japan instead.

    J puts his love for women
    his love for love, his devotion, his pain, his causing-of-pain,
    right out there.

    I’m 63 now & I’m on my way to pick up my ten-year-old
    stepdaughter
    and drive the car pool.
    I just finished a five-page letter to the County Supervisors
    dealing with a former supervisor,
    now a paid lobbyist,
    who has twisted the facts and gets paid for his lies. Do I
    have to deal with this creep? I do.

    James Laughlin’s manuscript sitting on my desk.
    Late last night reading his clear poems —
    and Burt Watson’s volume of translations of Su Shih,
    next in line for a comment.

    September heat.
    The Watershed Institute meets,
    planning more work with the B.L.M.
    And we have visitors from China, Forestry guys,
    who want to see how us locals are doing with our plan.
    Editorials in the paper are against us,
    a botanist is looking at rare plants in the marsh.

    I think of how J writes stories of his lovers in his poems —
    puts in a lot,
    it touches me,

    So recklessly bold — foolish? —
    to write so much about your lovers
    when you’re a long-time married man. Then I think,
    what do I know?
    About what to say
    or not to say, what to tell, or not, to whom,
    or when,

    still.

    (1993)

S TRONG S PIRIT

    Working on hosting Ko Un great Korean poet.
    I was sitting on the floor this morning in the dark
    At the Motel Eco, with my steel cup full of latte from the Roma
    calendar template sketched in pencil:
    student lunches, field trips in the Central Valley
    waterfowl? Cold Canyon? State Library with Kevin Starr?
    Charlie wants to help with speakers money so he gave us some
    a cultural visitor for a week at Aggie Davis
    in the flat plain valley just by Putah Creek,
    which was re-routed by engineers a hundred years ago.
    I’m on the phone and on the e-mail working all this out
    students and poets to gather at the Cafe California
    the Korean graduate student too
    His field is Nineteenth Century Lit and he’s probably a Christian,
    but says he’ll do this. Delfina, wife of Pak, a Korean Catholic,
    looks distasteful at the book and says
    Ko Un’s a Buddhist! — I don’t think she’ll come to the reading.
    Drive the car through a car wash — get Sierra mud off,
    about to meet him at the airport, his strong wife Sang-wha
    with him in flight from Seoul.
    First drive to Albany and pick up Clare Yoh,
    Korean Studies at Berkeley, lives near an
    old style eucalyptus grove, the smell surprised me
    when I visited California as a kid — I like it still.

    Down to the airport meet at Customs
    and now to pay respects to our friend
    poet, translator, Ok-ku died last fall
    her grave on the ridgetop near the sea.
    Straight up a hill due west
    walk a grassy knoll in the wind,
    Ko Un pouring a careful trickle of
soju
on her mound,
    us bowing deep bows
    â€” spirits for the spirit, bright poet gone
    then pass the cup among the living —

    strong.

    (2001)

S HARING AN O YSTER WITH THE C APTAIN

    â€œOn June 17, 1579, Captain Francis Drake sailed his ship, The Golden Hinde, into the gulf of the Farallones of the bay that now bears his name. He sighted these white cliffs and named the land Nova Albion. During his 36 day encampment in