Doubtful Harbor. Idris Anderson
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across the four windows—
a hardwood fallen,
rotted orange, its bark
curled sheets sloughed off,
its thick stump splintered,
the red blond of raw red oak.
To cold light I wake
empty of what I was;
and sure of nothing
but windows and oaks,
and contented almost
to be contented
in contemplation
of oriental perspective—
the higher up each pane
the deeper the wood,
patches of snow becoming
patches of white sky—
I meditate upon
such distinctions
and indistinctions.
Three Birds in One Cypress
In a glimpse of its flying, its deep-mouth pouch,
I say pelican, but no, when it lands in the top
of the cypress, its blue-gray wings fold with grace.
A pelican never settles his elbows any way but
awkwardly. Now through binoculars, the pouch
stretches out, a neck curves up to an elegant
crown, a slip of black feather like a fashionable hat,
straight javelin beak, and directly in line with the beak
a sharp yellow eye, a brow etched like wood grains
around a small knot. A heron, I know him. A Great Blue.
I’ve seen a vulture in the same tree and, yes,
there he is, brown and black hunched down in his nasty
feathers. His naked ugly wrinkled red head, I admit,
always a pleasure to note. In sweeping the lens
to his perch, I catch yellow, then focus: a beautiful bird,
black-and-white wing stripes easy to see even when worn
like a herringbone coat, and that gold head and breast.
A hawk, for sure. I search through Peterson’s
but can’t find him. I know Diane will know
straightaway: Juvenile Northern Harrier.
Now in the gray light of early evening, a sailboat
is making its way to the harbor. Tacking north
and east into wind, it comes closer and closer,
past the island of noisy cormorants and seals.
A fog has settled over the headland. I know
I’m not there, or there where I’d been only
yesterday looking for whales, their spouts far out
but visibly there. I walked the footpaths, tried
to name the flowers. But here, here I am
looking through these wide, open windows,
finding words and names for what I can see,
looking for a glimpse of the self in ignoring it,
putting it on the other side of binoculars, making it
small, letting it drift, go to seed or to silt,
catch a current of air and be blown out to the sea,
high with a gull’s view, waiting for, no, glutting after
what the tourists have left me, needing a gyroscope.
Safe-alone in Dick’s house I could choose which bird
to look at, as long as he lasted. I chose the yellow
of the Harrier, as still as an owl until he flew.
Sleeping and Waking
I hear cars on the highway as I fall asleep,
and a foghorn in the harbor—not the bell buoy
I remember and wish for—an electronic pulse
every fifteen or twenty seconds, and beyond,
the silent presence of the sea. Thoughts
and corrections of thought, feelings refining. What changes
at morning is light and more cars, the foghorn
a constant, and the dark massive headland.
Thinking begins in the window: a creek through marshes,
cypresses. On dry flats in the distance white birds
pick through mud for what the tide has left them.
Narrative happens, fiction, and lyric cry,
the wheeling and tilting of three vultures, fingers
on their wingtips feeling the air, and what the crabs do.
Starfish at Pescadero
1
I thought I wanted an Eastern mind,
a void emptied out of meaning and sequence and emphasis,
but this river coming down for miles from the mountains
never empties entirely into the sea.
We are walking toward—what I don’t know,
something you want me to see.
An egret wades the reedy edges.
His yellow eye peers a long time at a shadow.
I’m fishing too, casting lines
how far into knowing?
We cannot keep as we are.
I want, I think, to be one of the fishermen,
leaving as we arrive. They are carrying out a long boat,
a thing of craft and labor, seams and joints perfectly fitted,
smoothed out and sealed up in amber coats of varnish,
the blond wood gleaming gold.
In a dream of a time when I was barely awake,
I have heard them stealthy in black light before dawn,
stirring the current, whispering, sounds that carry over water:
boat knock, fish rise.
To want and to want and not to have.
Water winks a widening ring. A marsh hawk
wheels over us—the white patch on its back
unmistakable—head up, heavy wings beating.
Has it noticed white cloud as it rises and rises?
The ocean’s not far, just over the dunes. It breathes
like a shell. Everything I know is tidal, temporary.
If this is the day. If this is the last day.
Will I ever want to know what I want to say?
Soft, soft, our footfall. Everything is so far: my camera
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