Dan Gerber - Sailing through Cassiopeia

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Note to the Reader Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellen Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent. Thank you.

We hope you enjoy these poems. This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.For Deb again and again The inner what is it? if not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming. Rainer Maria Rilke

I

IN OUR RENTED CABIN

I live my late years as if Ive stolen my life. TU FU 712770 My son and grandson sleep in the next room.

Ive been awake and up for hours, and they will likely sleep a few more. Is it an old mans hunger to take in all he can of whats left of his life? Though still a year short of seventy, not really old; yet my father and grandfather didnt live much past it. This morning I think Im up early for them, watching the first light spread like soft butter over the rolling meadows of the foothills and the little green pastures on the mountains above. I cant get enough of this moment. What is it that urges me on to take it all in, to save what I can for them to see through my eyes?

PRELUDE TO A STARRY NIGHT

At any moment the red-shouldered hawk may fly right past my window without even thinking about it, may perch like a finial at the very tip top of the summer live oak that is both living and dying. At any moment the phone may ring with life-changing news, and the sound again will never be the same.

At any moment the great storm, still out over the sea in which the somber clouds grumble may move in over the shore behind which we feel so secure while we dream of ships going down. At any moment the frogs having grown used to my presence here on the hill above the pond may resume their conjuring of the twilight, calling down the Summer Triangle, just now assuming its throne, as this gaggle of stars Ive been parsing snaps into Lyra, quite suddenly.

FIRST LIGHT

Morning, busy in the distance, hammer blows, airplane in clouds. Crows, muffled growling of a saw, steady pulse of silence holding it together. Pause between breathing in, and out. Thought of air thinking days first light.

Foothills flaunting their ridges. Losing the moment as I saw it; finding it in its changes.

PROLEGOMENON

I resign to the cries of others in me, resign to my own imperfections, no longer pleased or satisfied judging others for the thought of their judging me.

DRIVING HOME

Its perfect, I said one day, the thought coming out of nothing I knew, to no one sitting beside me, while driving home from the market, said this without thinking, it seems, but could there be such a pure expression with no intention to express? The fields were incomparably green, the sky incomparably blue, lupine and poppies almost blared from the hillsides. At least thats the way I thought it. You were made for enjoyment, Ruskin said, and the world is filled with things you will enjoy, but every day I stumble over cries I cant still.

The world is suffering. Say it twice, and its not the same suffering. The world is suffering. Disease, eviction, envy, grief, loneliness, rejection, dementia, judgment, self-judgment, when those I love may not love each other, or me, anger, suffocation, helplessness, this helplessness, my suffering of choice at the moment. My friends daughter, the pianist, whose index finger, lost to sarcoma, I cant replace, my daughter whose breast I cant replace, my dear friends whose murdered son I cant replace, all over which Im at this moment suffering, though they may be, at this moment, not.

SURPRISE

When I lifted my hand to brush it away, the speck of lint on my sleeve suddenly remembered its lightly resting wings and fluttered up to embrace the tiny white moth just landed on the bathroom mirror.

QUAIL

When I listen to Bach the world is Bach.

QUAIL

When I listen to Bach the world is Bach.

When Mozart, then Mozart. Yesterday, all morning long the world was Arvo Prt, until it became a commune of California quail I watched scurry, as if of one mind with my mind among them back and forth across the road to the barn. When I turn to Machado, the world is incomparably Machado, until it becomes Wallace Stevens like the quail pulsing pizzicati of hosannas, taking me right back to Bach with the house moaning like Glenn Gould in its rising allegretto of the wind.

THE WORD IS THE PICTURE OF THINGS

Looking down at the lights of Earth, its constellations of lives, however unaware, signal back to the watching galaxies that have their seeing inside us. I praised flight and got stuck. I praised gravity and got lost.

Along the way my life decays, and ripens. Crow, why do you keep occurring? Fox, how long will you go on following me? My life would only be a job without you. Night, how long will you go on humming?

ROOKIES

These two young crows, still learning to be crows, dont quite yet know enough to fly away when I come close. They sit on the fence with their mouths half-open, making cacks on their way to a caw.

BARKING AND HOWLING

The coyotes shadow us all morning from the slopes above the valley. I call to my dogs to try to bring them in close, their hearing already more than half consumed by the taunts of these ancient cousins, like prideful Fetterman and his callow troops, lured to their deaths over Lodge Trail Ridge by Crazy Horse on his spotted mare. * Yesterday I saw a coyote standing by the road.

I stopped and looked at her, and she looked back at me. She didnt appear threatened, or threatening, or nervous, or displaced, or displeased, or wanton, or hungry, or curious, or annoyed, or anything at all. She just looked at me while I stood and looked at her. And then she turned and trotted off into the morning. * The coyotes in the canyon are making a kill. Their voices rise through the darkness, a chorus of hundreds it seems, most likely closing in on the spotted fawn I saw this morning, dragging its right hind leg to keep up with its mother and twin.

I pray it may not be the wounded fawn I saw, now trembling in fear. Another perhaps but not that one.

CROCUS

Thirty-six years ago my father died while snow was melting and white and yellow crocuses, in their spiked cups of bright green, push their way into the air, through soil thats just now waking up. Without even noticing, Im in the present tense. Does this mean the soil is just now waking up, though, by the calendar, its the 12th of July? Or does it mean were always in the present, wherever we may be thinking? And where will I find a crocus in the withering heat of mid-July? fragile, teasing, iridaceous little flower I otherwise hardly ever think of.

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