to comfort you for what
you’ve lost than it was
when we were young.
Harder then than
what happens today
or what you expect
to fall tomorrow.
Now that sorrow
is a next door neighbor
and we exchange
hats and shoes,
and casseroles.
The sweet grass was soft
in the dark campground
half an hour’s moonless
walk beyond Dachau.
I slept in my thrift shop
Hungarian cotton raincoat.
It was warm enough
for the mid summer night.
The crook of my arm served
as my pillow. Some kind,
early rising campers
gave me a cup of coffee.
Seven years later when
I was fomenting revolution
in LA, I slept on the floor
of a Guatemalan millworker
at Bethlehem Steel
in Vernon, California.
A rolled up field coat
was my pillow this time.
Forty years after that,
I was taking my wife’s ashes
to Bangkok and got stuck
at the Hong Kong airport
when pro-democracy
demonstrators shut down
the airport overnight.
I wriggled into a spot under
a row of seats and used my
knapsack with the special
container of her ashes inside
to nap for a few restless hours.
I did not dream of a ladder
that reached up to heaven
full of angels and with God
at the top extending his love.
I know what a father’s love
feels like though. My Dad
showed me how to make a bed
and a pillow with sprigs of
bear clover and cedar boughs
under a tarp next a trout creek.
We stretched out our Army
surplus mummy bags and
gazed up at the stars, happy
with the trout that he had taught
me how to catch that day and
cook in a skillet over a campfire.
above the forested
canyon so the light
was still dim and gray.
I passed the stump
of the redwood felled
by loggers a hundred
and fifty years ago.
Hollow now and covered
with moss, it looks like
a grave-robbed
green sarcophagus.
Two sawyers working
a ten-foot cross cut saw
and driving iron wedges
with heavy sledges
may have worked for days
to slay the ancient tree.
Then the limbs were stripped
and the trunk cut into lengths
short enough for teams of oxen
to haul the five-ton sections
on heavy sledges with greased
runners to the railroad.
The only sound this morning
was my footsteps on the trail
and a single bird somewhere
up the canyon.
I live in a house built
of redwood, I walk across
a deck made of redwood
to get to the asphalt road.
I think I should offer
a prayer of gratitude to
those trees that gave their
lives for our shelter.
There is a large one just
a few feet from the front door
surrounded by an octagonal
bench made of redwood.
Perhaps in dark of midnight
of the new moon, I will get
naked and go out the front door,
and give thanks to those trees.
I could sit on the bench,
careful to avoid splinters,
and listen to the last carousers
downtown at the Silver Peso,
far away dogs, highway
traffic even father away, or
the close whisper of a breeze
echoing my breath.
that’s topped by the graveyard
where St Patrick is said to lie
beneath a massive stone.
The first story I ever heard
about Ireland was that St Patrick
drove all the snakes off the
Island named Eire into the sea.
And I was baffled
and saddened by that tale
because I was fascinated
by snakes when I was five.
Years later I found out
that there were never any
snakes in Ireland, not
when Patrick lived anyway.
But good stories don’t
always have to be based
on facts. Unfortunately
for snakes, at least
for Christians. The fall
from Grace and so on.
When Satan tempted Eve
while coiled in the tree.
Some cultures revere snakes
as symbols of resurrection.
The serpent twined around
a staff, known as
The Rod of Aesclepius
is widely recognized
as a symbol of doctors
and medical care.
Derived from the legend
of the Greek God of Healing.
Or itself from the even older
story of when the Israelites
were in the Wilderness
and dying from venomous
snake bites, God told Moses
to make a brass pole
with a snake entwined
around it and any snake
bite victim who saw it
would be cured.
Patrick surely knew
that story from scripture
and he was not the one
who spun the yarn
about driving snakes
into the sea. The symbol
of the shamrock is the one
that appeals to me.
In any field of clover
you can find the living
representation of
the Trinity.
We came to Ireland
to hear stories, and
the stones have much
to tell, even perhaps
to tell some of our own,
I have a few about snakes
as well, they have never
been demons to me.
The first one I ever saw was
when I was five years old and
we had recently moved to Brisbane
just south of San Francisco.
Mr. Ward lived across the street
in a converted garage surrounded
by a wildly overgrown garden.
A few charred timbers lingered
under ivy that covered
the foundation of the house
where his wife had died
when the house burned down
years before. He never rebuilt it.
Mr Ward worked the night shift
at the Hamm’s brewery in the City
on Bryant near Seals Stadium.
The Giants were playing there
while the new park at Candlestick
was under construction. We could
see the cranes from our house.
Mr Ward would sometimes come out
to join us, tell us stories about people
who had lived up here on the hill.
Like the man who had lived in
the house that we now rented.
After a landslide next to the house
a riot of poison oak had erupted.
He cut it all down and burned it.
Stood close to the pyre so he
could tend it. Breathed too much
of the smoke, which inflamed
his lungs badly. Had to be hospitalized,
but I don’t remember if Mr Ward said
that he died. He just wanted us to know,
that burning poison oak was a bad idea.
One day, as we standing out in the street,
a garter snake crawled out onto the road.
I had never seen a real live snake before.
It was beautiful, with red and black
checkered sides, cinnamon and turquoise
around its head, a pale green stripe
down center of its back. Mr Ward picked
it up so I could look at it. I turned to Mommy
and asked if I could keep it. She laughed
and said No, not this one, maybe another one.
Mr Ward put the snake down in the shrubs
at the edge of his garden and the snake quickly
disappeared. He said it guards his yard from pests.
Later on, Mommy said Mr Ward was a hermit.
Because he lived in that converted garage and
didn’t rebuild the house because his wife
had died in the fire when it burned down.
I told her that when I grew up I wanted
to be a hermit too. And have a wild garden
with snakes and I would work nights at Hamm’s
so I could play with my snakes in the afternoon.
We moved away from Brisbane a few months
later to a brand new subdivision in Marin County.
Mr Ward gave us a Century plant, the kind that
goes decades before it blooms. Years later it did.
And I caught my first snake there, a gopher snake,
long enough to wrap twice around my waist like a belt.
I said to Mom, “You promised me I could keep one.”
And so I did, the first of many.
I think whoever told that story
about St Patrick driving the snakes
into the sea was making a parallel
to the story about Jesus exorcising
a multitude of demons out of a man
and putting them into a herd of swine
who then ran into the Sea of Galilee
and drowned.
