1/ The Indomitable Peninsula
Taken by astronauts with startling f o rce
So the string-straight lines and calculated curves
So the mirrors of rivers,
The vast emptiness of the earth
Above the line
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Below
Empty
parallels without rain
A moon landscape of gigantic invisible bones
One night I camped in a grove of cardon
I could hear the coyotes somewhere singing
you and the light
The rose moon
the giant dark
Before this
between the cliffs and the shoreline
there must once have been birds
2/The Icy Road to Olympus
Honest l y
This is Destruction
Out in the vague breeze
which drops down dizzyingly into the darkness at our feet
it was from some-
where out
here,
that
h e
Caught sight
of the mountain
bright blue
and spread out
on Panic Peak.
3/A Land Defined by the Sea
By moonlight the waves broke
and sometimes I saw the faint lights
We rumbled by
that old road
This book
The country where i ve l i ve d
the Sequoia Sempervirens where the children have been reaching
Listen.
There are still places where you can
200 foot high dunes
here and there engulfing
the lonely
line and sky
the border enclosed within sight
of the mountain s
that rise
along the earth
and the bracket. of the water:
The west
an assemblage of peaks,
The Olympic Peninsula looped by a highway,
A ribbon
the Ocean
a tiny tangle of time
I was
the Salmon feasting ,
Invader and wild tide
What keeps so much wild is the wilderness
around the perimeter
Sky
Horse
The bulk of the peninsula
Green
increasingly
cut over
You cannot eat your wilderness
There is no way to headquarter a river
West across The Great Bend
The Blackberry fallen from nearby
The beach at low tide
the water
the voracious well below the road
that winds
around houses
like ours
lined with
trees
Quiet September
in the mornings
when it burns
just once,
at dusk,
we saw above the still surface.
Balmy or starry
Or
Agonizingly bright
These three poems are the first in a series of experimental erasures of Time Life’s North American Wilderness Series. They, I hope, interrogate the books’ previously colonizing language and relay my own anxieties concerning major climate events.