Poems




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​           Places I Haven’t Been Before

            The hunter surveys the land 
            from a cliff overlooking the valley, 
            seeing the course of a stream
            revealed by a winding strip of cottonwood,
            looking for signs of game to feed his family.
            It’s thirteen thousand years ago in North America.

            He’s an explorer, always moving on
            to look for new territory 
            with abundant game and fruits of the land.
            His people survived by 
            always being ready to move on, searching, 
            coming down the coast over centuries
            to bypass the ice-covered north
            until coastal green spread inland, 
            where they moved upriver
            until there was no need to go by boat. 
            But they keep moving, because moving 
            is what has brought them what they sought,
            now their habit and way of life.

            In a PBS documentary a San Carlos Apache’s words 
            ring a bell somewhere inside me.
            He’s telling how he surveys a valley 
            from a high vantage point on a rock outcrop,
            how he always wants to see 
            what’s in the valley and over the next ridge,
            and when he reaches it, 
            what’s over the ridge after that.

            He’s reading my mail, describing 
            the yearning I always feel, something in my bones, 
            when exploring territory I haven’t seen before.
            And I always want to go places
            I haven’t been before.


            There are few trails I can still hike 
            that I haven’t traveled, but I keep looking –
            finding two new trails this month. 
            Hiking mostly in the foothills and the Bosque now,
            I also walk trails of the mind I haven’t traveled yet.
            I want to know, to become aware of new things,
            to understand what I haven’t understood before. 
            To explore the mental and emotional 
            white places on the map
            of my interior landscape 
            and territory of the mind and heart
            that others have explored and written of,
            vaster than I can imagine.
            It’s like feasting at a banquet 
            where the food never runs out and I never get my fill.

            BN 



            The Mountain Will Swallow You

            The mountain will swallow you, if you let it.
            Start by lifting the pack to your bended knee,
            put your right arm through the strap and swing it 
            up and around onto your back, 
            not sure you can actually carry the weight all the way.
            With your left arm through the other strap
            buckle the hip belt and the sternum strap, 
            and take a step, that first step of thousands of steps – 
            and start walking. 

            You just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
            Once you get a rhythm and some momentum,
            you think This isn’t as hard as I thought.
            Then you start to notice things as you stride along 
            above the West Fork of the Santa Barbara:
            ponderosa and fir and stands of aspen, 
            boulders the trail winds around,
            the ridges looming above the canyon, 
            butterflies, ravens and a soaring hawk.

            Still, you wonder if you’re up to it –
            two days and twelve miles to the divide
            with nearly a third of your weight on your back to start.
            It’s just one step and then the next
            in an almost pleasurable monotony 
            that becomes a succession 
            of seemingly endless next points reached,
            getting yourself to the next spot, 
            then picking another one,
            eating the trail one bite at a time.
            Minute by minute, hour after hour,
            until your soul seeps into the landscape like water
            and your feet have grown roots. 

            Cut off from roads and traffic, from the sound of car engines,
            unplugged from cellphones and schedules and calendars
            you’re now touching the Earth
            and you feel the rhythm of her pulse
            as yours entrains with it, synchronized.

            Finally you reach a meadow with a good campsite
            seven miles up the canyon 
            just before the trail crosses the stream.
            The massive ridges so high above the canyon
            look down on you with indifference, not impressed
            but without objection, tolerant and respecting.
            The mountain has swallowed you –
            you have become wilderness. 

            BN



            Country of Stone, Company of Stone

            I fly on wings back to the still waiting
            stone and sand and juniper and prickly pear,
            to the canyon country 
            that knows a deeper hidden history
            than the wink and blink of time in history books. 
            They don’t reach the bottom of the well
            where the rock hold its secrets,
            a silent history of Earth-making-and-unmaking,
            mass extinctions and tectonic plate shifts
            that even the human tentacles of science 
            can only trace the broad outlines of.
 
            A hundred million years of secret rock-tales
            are bound there in Wingate, Entrada, and Navajo sandstone
            on the Colorado Plateau and surrounding mountains.
            I might live eighty-odd years,
            ninety if I’m lucky – or unlucky,
            but the stone will endure.

            When I go to the canyons
            I feel something of the depth and weight 
            of what rock has weathered,
            even if I can’t read the story.
            I become the size I am, no more. 
            At the same time my spirit expands 
            beyond the bounds of mind and body, 
            and with that breadth I live larger than I am. 
            Listening with my feet I hear something 
            silent and vast, feeling its vibration 
            as I move over its endless rolling terrain.

            I’m free and light as I feel my feet
            tread the weight of ages that the stone holds,
            indifferent to our human mucking-about on it.
            So I go back over and over, year after year,
            to renew the acquaintance of my few years
            with stone that feels like eternity.

            BN
        
        




            ​Grace

            A ballet dancer, a sculpture titled Bird in Flight
            a gazelle gliding across an African plain.
            Anything smooth and elegant, 
            often in motion or suggesting it,
            we say is graceful – full of grace.
            Grace is also something of the spirit, 
            not something that can be held and kept in a cage, 
            itself a spirit and a spark 
            that lights on me like a butterfly on my shoetop.
            Like gentle rain on parched desert ground
            it comes over me and I’m flowing with the current.
            It washes the dust from my soul
            and leaves me clean and shining
            when the winds blow the clouds away.  
            Something warm and pure like sunlight 
            has entered my heart and soul and for a time I’m freed
            from all that weighs me down and holds me back. 

            It stays only as long as it wants,
            then having a mind of its own, leaves without a farewell,
            and I return to life’s “business as usual.”
            I chop wood and carry water, buy groceries,
            wash the dishes, do the laundry.
            Everything is like it was before, 
            full of routine and empty of grace.
    ​
            I no longer regret that it flew away, 
            knowing it will visit again,
            but elusive and not at my bidding,
            not something I can capture and cage.
            I can only savor and appreciate it
            when it shows at my door and grants its favors.
            But I can leave the door open
            and welcome grace when it walks in.

            BN