Why I Didn't Fish

Willows at the edge of windy canyon flutter,
switchback winding one lane road and cold
gravel track, rock debris, a downward grade.

Rushing water currents thundering like wind
through pine trees and crooked oak. Reddish
sediment, swirling haystack, eddies and seam.

Yellow leaves like sunrise to shadowy forest,
tree stumps, fallen logs, and gray boulders,
sandy slope lake bottom exposed in October.

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This amorphous thought stuns the ego.
Enormous fears fight themselves into nothingness.

An approaching dark darkens and settles
like embers in the fire of the coming night.

Cottonwood at the river's edge,
smooth rounded rocks,
shallow water rapids,
the landscape of the imagination

pushes on its expedition
into mountainous terrain.

A golden yellow
sky over hazy ridges
jet planes overhead

Heard above the wind
and din of swaying pine trees
jetliner at night

Sudden evening wind
tickles the hairs on my legs.
I can't fall asleep.

And the Earth

Smoke haze bleeds into every canyon
of the watershed like a gaseous poison;
mountain ridges lost in gauzy softness
and gray-blue monotony.

Like a line of poetry played out to its bone
of meaning, or meaning itself, a tarnished sky
at day’s end knows nothing of its beauty.
Dry broken sagging dead trees rotting

got nothin' on me. The dog days growling
in the clouds, the leaves trotting in the wind.
Each weed or weed stalk weaving in air
and the earth a mystery underfoot.

Beaver Creek

Cascading water and spidery ferns
green as pine needles in sunlight,

I look upstream. The canyon climbs
skyward and shadowy where it slopes,

fat boulders pebbled in the dark creek,
the granite shades of black and white.

I plant a thought in the landscape,
and slip naked into the water alone.