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Three Poems by Luci Shaw
The grit on the track
The ground is always there, witnessing
how you walk. You need light to travel
a dark path, and you need to travel light.
Otherwise the shadows that turn out to be
submerged boulders and roots will trip you,
and your heavy pack will bear you down
into the hard anguish of gravel that is more
than your knees can bear. Even roadside dust
clings to your heels as if God is in
every fiber, a kind of mineral truth
present in every crystal of sand.
Gravity, and the possibility of falling,
will keep you aware. In the twilight you
come home from walking the dog in the woods
with the walk still clinging to you -- twigs
and the stain of berries on your soles.
Each humus clod from the forest floor
answers back -- another footfall. This is all
my handwork, he is saying. Stay with this mud,
this granite. Every other step you take
will be a revelation.
The sound of a circle
I balance it
on the hollow of my left palm
so that its base rests
on my hand's bones.
Cool, flawless,
an unbroken circle,
the rim a ring of light
brass-bright from
a polishing rag and only
a little rubbing.
Like a pen outlining
the shape of the world
I draw the wooden baton
around its perimeter
with my right hand,
moving it against the curved lip
slowly, smooth as a wing
in flight, so as not to start
a shiver against the metal.
And again.
Five orbits of the little
hemisphere. Listen: at first
a low drone, then higher,
a treble voice filling the hollow,
circling the room, fluid
as a bell of water. When
I lay the instrument back
on the sill, the sound dies,
but not the music.
Tenting, Escalante
Even when I close my eyes, even later in
the tent, dreaming, I see banks and rivers running red.
My blood has drunk color from the stone
as if it were the meal I needed. I am ready to eat
any beauty -- these vistas of stars and coming storms.
The mesas and vermilion cliffs. The light they magnify
into the canyon. The coyote echoes. The distances.
The rocks carved with ancient knowledge.
But after vast valleys I am so ready for this
low notch in the gorge, the intimate cottonwoods
lifting their leafy skirts and blowing their soft
kisses into my tent on the wasteland’s stringy
breath. The spaces between the gusts are rich
with silence. I am ready to stay, sleep, dream,
breathe the grace of wind and earth that is
never too much, and more than I will ever need.
In this parchment land, the scribble
and blot of junipers and sagebrush, each crouched
separate, rooted in its own lonely place,
spreads low to the sand, holding it down
the way the tent-pegs anchor my tent, keep it
from blowing away. The way I want my words
to hold, growing maybe an inch a year,
grateful for the least glisten of dew.
Luci Shaw is the author of The Green Earth: Poems of Creation, Water Lines: New and Selected Poems, and many other books. She is active as a workshop and retreat leader on poetry and journal-writing, and lectures widely on topics related to the creative process. She lives in Bellingham, Washington. Learn more about Luci at her website, www.lucishaw.com.
Copyright © 2004 by Luci Shaw. All rights reserved.
This page was published in September 2004.
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