Shooting from the Hip

"Why dost thou wildly rush and roar,
 Mad River, O Mad River?"

I.


Do you know what is funny?

What is funny in heaps
of quartz, or
heaps of pyrite,

I found it all so funny under the
noon sun, so funny beneath the pine heat,
the Sierra summer.

(Laughed hard, knew life. Life in gradiants,
we crumble and intuit)

(Do you know what is funny I say
it all is.)

II.


And I buckle under unwavering stares like
the river,

true arrows-
there is a difference between youth brave and
grown brave-

you have grown brave-
you there, have grown brave:

find the gentle body of bones, all
heaps of quartz and humble
stone, take it into your bed
of rock,

take it into your flannel dreams.

Dream of all of the ones that were here then,
there then. We are the ones that are here now.

And Ian could not sleep for all the thinking.
In the dark and heat, and beneath July,
he was many things.

III.


I will write a tiny book, and in it
I will say:

I have all the beauty of the lost den

I have all the ashes of the night sky,
I have the smudge of memory,

of eyes