changing, may have to change, or to be changed, so that our reality can be narrated.
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76 JT BUFFALO GALS
Five Vegetable Poems "A- 77
Torrey Pines Reserve (For Bob and Mary Elliott)
Ground dry as yellow bones.
A dust of sand, gold-mica-glittering.
Oh, dry! Grey ceanothus stems
twisted and tough; small flowers. A lizard place.
Rain rare and hard as an old woman's tears runnelled these faces of the cliffs.
Sandstone is softer than the salty wind; it crumbles, wrinkles, very old, vulnerable. Circles in the rock in hollows worn by ocean long ago.
These are eyes that were his pearls.
One must walk lightly; this is fragile. Hold to the thread of way. There's narrow place for us in this high place between the still desert and the stillness of the sea. This gentle wilderness.
The Torrey pines
grow nowhere else on earth.
Listen:
you can hear the lizards listening.
Lewis and Clark and After Always in the solemn company (save on the Desert Hains) of those great beings (we did not think much about it, trees by our tribe being seen with the one eye) we walked across a forest continent
Ohone! ohone! the deep groves, the high woods of Ohio! the fir-dark mountains, the silent lives, the forests, the forests of Oregon!
West Texas
Honor the lives of the terrible places: greasewood, rabbitbrush, prickly pear, yucca, swordfern, sagebrush, the dingy wild-eyed sheep alert and deer like shadows starting from the rock. In gait and grace and stubborn strength with delicate hoof or filament root, stonebreakers, lifebringers. Let there be rain for them.
(1985)
(1980)
(1973)
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The young fir in the back of the car
was silent, didn't admire the scenery,
took up residence without comment
in the high field near the old apple,
trading a two-foot pot for the Columbia Gorge.
When the wind came up, the branches said Ssshhh to it, but the trunk and roots were taciturn, and will be a hundred years from now, perhaps.
Where the glass bubbles and colored lights were, will be rain, and owls.
It won't hear carols sung again.
But then, it never listened.
The Crown of Laurel (1982)
He liked to feel my fingers in his hair.
So he pulled them off me, wove a wreath of them, and wears it at parades and contests, my dying fingers with their kitchen smell
interlocked around his sunny curls.
Sometimes he rests on me a while.
Aside from that, he seems to have lost interest
It wasn't to preserve my Virtue' that I ran! What's a nymph like me to do with something that belongs to men? It's just I wasn't in the mood. And he didn't care. It scared me.
Five Vegetable Poems A- 7 9
The little goadeg boys can't even talk, but still they wait till they can smell you feel like humping with a goadeg in the woods, rolling and scratching and laughing -- they can laugh! -- poor little hairycocks,
I miss them.
When we were tired of that kind of thing my sister nymphs and I would lie around, and talk, and tease, and stroke, and chase, and stretch out panting for another talk, and sleep in the warm shadows side by side under the leaves, and all was as we pleased.
And then the mortal hunters of the deer, the poachers, the deciduous shepherd-boys: they'd stop and gape and stare with owly eyes, not even hoping even when I smiled... New every spring like daffodils, those boys. But once for forty years I met one man up on the sheep-cropped hills of Arcady. I kissed his wrinkles, the ravines of time I cannot enter, gazing in his eyes, whose dark dimmed and deepened, seeing less always, till he died. I came to his burial. Among the villagers I walked behind his grey-haired wife. She could have been Time's wife, my grandmother.
And then there were my brothers of the streams, O my river-lovers, with their silver tongues so sweet to thirst! the cool, prolonged delight of a river moving in me, of his flow and flow and flow!
They send to my roots their kindness, even now, and slowly I drink it from my mother's hands.
So that was all I knew, until he came, hard, bright, burning dry, intent: one will, instead of wantings meeting; no center but himself, the Sun. A god
80 JT BUFFALO GALS
is like that, I suppose; he has to be.
But I never asked to meet a god,
let alone make love with one! Why did he think
I wanted to? And when I told him no,
what harm did he think it did him?
It can't be hard to find a girl agape
to love a big blond blue-eyed god.
He said so, said, "You're all alike."
He's seen us all; he knows. So, why me?
I guess that maybe it was time for me to give up going naked, and get dressed. And it took a god to make me do it Mother never could. So I put on my brown, ribbed stockings, and my underwear of silky cambium, and my green dress. And I became my clothing being what I wear.
I run no more; the winds dance me. My sister, seamstress, sovereign comes up from the dark below the roots to mend my clothes in April. And I stand in my green patience in the winter rains.
He honors me, he says, to wear my fingers turning brown and brittle, clenched in the bright hair of his head. He sings.
My silence crowns the song.
(1987)
V
"The Direction of the Road" and "Vaster Than Empires And More Slow"
The relation of our species to plant life is one of total dependence and total exploitation -- the relation of an infant to its mother. Without plants the earth would have remained bare rock and water; without plant respiration we'd suffocate promptly; without vegetable food (firsthand or, as in meat, secondhand) we starve. There is no other food.
Deo, Demeter, the grain-mother, and her daughter/self Kore the Maiden called Persephone, raped by the Godfather's brother and buried to rise again, are myth-images of this relationship, recognized by 'primitive'farmers as fundamental. It is still fundamental, but can be completely ignored by a modem city dweller whose actual experience of plants is limited to florists' daisies and supermarket beans. The ignorance of the urban poor is blameless; the arrogant ignorance of the urban educated, particularly those in
