THE ROOM OF MIND: Nine high-country poems in a surreal soundscape…

IMAGE: Western Yellowjacket, native of the Intermountain West… Perhaps poems are simply paths we make in walking, sometimes, even when headed the wrong way; these things—gifts, one picks up and passes on, along the way. A New Friend for Paolo Before I could remember how to say I was walking, he leapt out of his car, speaking perfect English, throwing my pack in his trunk. "You can stay with me. But you'll need a car, some money and a date, perhaps." How could I refuse? The idea that I must walk the whole way went up in a puff of smoke on the sound of tires quite used to losing their grip three or more curves down the road. On the Necessity of Poetry (1) Walking from spring to spring, one tires quickly of all the intellectual bushbeating, telling me I'm not thirsty when I'm thirsty. (2) Let's be simple: A house with a hearth is a home with a center. After somebody lets the fire go out, they always like to tell you it wasn't important. (3) Bird calls are often answered by silences of equal duration. Who is to say which one— the sound or the silence, is more important. (4) We are born naked; we make love naked; we die naked; Though not strictly necessary, doing poetry naked seems to work just fine, too. (5) Once the commons are fenced in and sold, on the very same ground we'll argue incessantly about— the necessity of poetry. Lamb of the Lord All energy is directed down to a single point as with but one blow he hammers the bullet into the kidgoat's skull. Just as deftly, he slits its throat, draining the blood. Still warm, what was once all muscle and resistance lays limp in the straw, while a sibling is tied with a short snatch of rope and wrenched up to the scale in one smooth motion. More than 12 kilos means certain death. He carries the two carcasses by the hind legs, one in each hand, working hard to keep their dangling heads with stubby little devil's horns out of the freshly fallen snow, making his way from barn to his basement where he'll dress the meat. Three of the village children peak out from the side of the barn, their blushed cherub faces watching the scene as if from a slightly distant. more subtle realm of being. A lean black dog growls and snaps, cutting frenzied figure 8's in the snow around the farmer's slow, methodical. all-business-like trek back to the house. Meanwhile, in a distant city, a dinner party is about to begin. It is spring, Everyone is dressed in their Sunday best. "How tender," they say. At that same moment, the farmer and his family say grace and cross themselves. From a window looking in: Inside, almost timeless, happy, faces look down into their steaming bowls of fresh stomach stew. Outside, in the mountain darkness, snow falls without a whisper of wind, flake by flake erasing all the travail of the day's passage. Truly, if there were indeed angels, how they would endlessly love to discuss the mysterious ways our world of earthlings is threaded together anew, each time a life is taken, each time it snows, each time— we break bread. The Room of Mind My conscious mind is but a small room, full of facts of different kinds; it has no windows and is rather stuffy. Outside the room is non- conscious mind; it is vast and surrounds the room like a wilderness over which I have little control, although I can venture there, which is refreshing. I've noticed that walking gets me out of my own little room. I've noticed, too, that it's easy to get stuck inside— very stuck. Before I know it, forgetting that poems are something like paths we make in walking, I'll mistake the dark little closet where I've locked up all the unpaid bills of the past for the door which leads outside.