The Wild Iris

I tried domestics first,
nibbling on roses and marigolds
while my neighbors weren't looking,
but these had no soul,
just a bland aftertaste
like weak decaf
cooling in Styrofoam cups.
So I took to the foothills
to chew Indian paintbrush
until my mouth bled fire
and inhale the suffocating sage
until I grew a spare lung.

I bit into the egg-shaped,
purple fruit of prickly pears,
whose blood-red juice stained my hands
and whose sharp fuzz lodged in my tongue.

To ease the burning
I grabbed a handful of waxy petals
from the yucca's torch for a poultice
then got drunk
on the sky-blue berries of a juniper.

Finally I chewed the live oak's acorns,
bitter as any analgesic,
to free the deep folds in my brain
where pain collects
and give me room to understand
the wild iris: lavender-blue,
white-throated, streaked with yellow.



The Cost of Ascent

I passed a lone pine rising
from the Sierra scrub of stone and sage.
Its crown was split long ago
by ice or lightning into two half-trunks
whose tortuous branches paralleled
prevailing canyon winds
to form a double canopy
fifty feet above the trail.

It was the lower trunk that bothered me
where stumps of dead limbs,
ash-gray and riven with cracks,
stuck out like petrified dragons
or massive driftwood spikes
driven through the bark.

I wanted to hack off
these fossil remnants
as if they contradicted
both life and beauty]
until I saw in them
old trophies of necessary loss.



If Trees Remembered

The elm lay in heaps,
ends chewed by chain saws
into raw, yellowish wounds.

I laid its limbs carefully as an undertaker
in my pick-up's rusty-blue bed.
Later the damp wood crackled smoke up
and out my chimney in phantom branches
reaching for a sign,
                                        as if the tree
by pleading could reconstitute
all its combusted elements.

          but only the moon appeared,
cool as iron, unmoved,
aloof to any plea for reincarnation,
being already dead.

              All this if trees remembered.