The Quality of Light

It is as various as species are:
the laser plumb line dropped down city walls
you see some evenings, sitting in a bar.

It is a nimbostratus scrim, a pall
backlit, like the image on the Shroud of Turin
(or so they say); a reef, where wan light falls

from fifty feet above. And still more wan:
Good Friday’s sun, just edging past the cum-
ulus-wrought drapery—eclipse at noon.

And then, of course, the cool spectrum dawn spoons
on bedroom walls, in culinary runes,
its salmon/saffron/cream (erased too soon).

Selective Memory

Old Faithful wasn’t really faithful hour on the hour.
No, much more vividly I remember paint pots
spitting out their liquid quids of clay: detritus
from an errant potter’s potter’s wheel,
“paint” the universal hue of whole wheat dough.
Benign. Unless a hot blob got on you, mating
with your skin like a cancer. The fumaroles hissed
and pissed their way into memory—muddy cats
in heat, their backs up. One wrong step:
they’d take your skin off in an instant,
go down to bone in the shortest of short order.

A place of gorgeous “what-if?” danger is what
I recall: crazy shutterbugs forgoing the safety
of their cars for shots of blasé bison champing
weeds. A slammed door could have spooked
them into 900 pounds per head of galumphing terror.
It didn’t happen. But while we visited—Mom,
Dad, and eighth-grade I—a bear on the prowl
for ursine fast food got into a tent, gnawed
the heads of two sleep-dazzled campers
to the skull. A third got away, I only
have escaped alone to tell thee of it….

Nature can’t be loved too freely; it doesn’t
love you back. That’s the moral of the tale
that I draw now. And yet for me, Yellowstone
is much more memorably the manmade story
of an old cold hotel without TV. So poorly run
by the Park Service that in a seedy CCC-built
dining hall-cum-movie house out back,
they were showing, this spring of ’62, a 1940’s
Cary Grant flick in smudged black-and-white.
A soundtrack like some underwater tête-à-tête.

We soon went back to our Spartan little room
down nighted corridors. Gray walls and three
small iron beds all in row, with high arched heads,
Like we’re the Three Bears! I recall Mom saying:
How can anything so niggling and pathetic
now appear “just right”

in the strobe-lit halls of memory?

Pavlov’s, Down by the Log Dump

A front yard so full of plastic
things, it couldn’t hold two more:
toys & bookshelves, store displays,
cups & plates & pairs of those gummy
children’s shoes that look like an insult,
a cutting remark. What wood there is—
the house itself, a buckled picnic table
& its single bench—allegorize the local
weather, the high-cloud homeliness
overhead. But you supply the irony
to this scene: the acres of just-cut pine
in the mucky space next door, strapped
to truck beds, piled in orange stacks
like No. 2 pencils before a test; &
the ancient hound—half St. Bernard?—
hunkered down at one end of the flayed
table, drooling in conditioned response
to some final bell.