How It Got Planted
     For Coonie and Margaret Cameron

             "The transformation took place so gradually
             that it became part of the pattern without
             causing any astonishment."
                               --Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees

They read the story
I want to say
because of the way they sat
next to each other on the ledge
under the bookshelves
that summer afternoon, though
it was his voice reading.
When their children and I were young
they read to us
so I didn't need an explanation
even if I was in college
on one of the visits I had to keep
making back to them.
More delicious than dessert
to be so invited
I let my body sag into the couch
my eyes drift out the window
into the extravagant waters
of Juan de Fuca Straits.

It was the passion of Elzeard Bouffier
French sheepherder
who planted one hundred thousand oaks
from acorns he'd found and culled
poking each one deep with an iron rod
everywhere he grazed his sheep
wide over barren hills.

Many would never sprout
he knew the odds
but age fifty-five to eighty-seven, through two world wars
he just kept herding and planting.
Not just birds and creeks evolved
with the rooting oaks
but even human discord
in dismal pockets throughout the countryside
subsided and turned community.
A whole landscape transformed so quietly
no one knew how it came about.

The story woke me
like the pure note of a struck bell.
Until then in my brief self-important life
if I had pondered the long view
it was perhaps for geologic time--
seas forming and drying a thousand decades,
shale and sandstone remnants--
arresting drama in its own right
but not this astonishment,
all the leaves that could come to shimmmer
from one visionary, steadfast life.

The rustle resonated
in the readers
who lived their place
who walked it, rowed around it
saved its rainwater from their roof
built a perch for a belted kingfisher
on their porch
delighted daily in the way the ferry
would burst around Neck Point
on or off schedule.
Never tired of the sea's expressive surface
or the solid madrone's arching grace,
they knew the shoals around the islands
by chart and eye, celebrated tide turns
cherished each cove and neighbor
designed their house, built their boat
sculpted the creatures, drew the earth forms

and invited back all her life
this one lost-soil soul
until all those seed times
finally lifted a forest of gratitude
for the vision:
how earth place can be loved
which I remembered as Bouffier's story
they gave to me,
which I see now as much
their story
he gave to me.

Shedding Our Skins

A brief rain must have come in the night
because the skin of the earth was soft that day
just powdery enough to show footprints
so I was stepping carefully with you
in our silence, its own fragile container,
when we saw an object shimmering under a bush.
There was a snake skin
so perfectly shed and whole
(even the eyes intact)
we couldn't imagine how the snake got out.
He must have been barely gone
for the shape of the skin had not yet fallen flat.
Round ghost of a snake.
But how had he done it?
If there had been a struggle, there was no trace,
just a delicate luminous artifact
of the toughest act imaginable.

And I thought of my own effort to cast off my old self,
blood on the ground from pieces of flesh
I'd tried to cut away,
bushes knocked flat, earth scraped,
buzzards alone drawn to eye the place.
Signs of violence all that would be left.
Nothing to shine with the love that had made it necessary.

Field

        at the edge of the field
        waiting for the pure moment
                                    --Theodore Roethke


There needs to be a field,
an open space
of no particular distinction.
A low aggregate of bushes
and stones behind a barn
or a grassy stretch
marked by a faint path.
Maybe a field at the side
of a road before trees begin
or a pasture where a paint horse
grazes.
You know if you stand there
needy, receptive,
it can happen.

At death's edge, remember the open
field, and how something pure arrived,
lifting you out.

Acknowledgements:

The epigraph for "Field" is from Theodore Roethke's Fourth Meditation of "Meditations of An Old Woman," The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday and Co., New York, 1966).

The epigraph for "How It Got Planted" Jean Giono's The Man Who Planted Trees (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont, 1985).

The author also wishes to acknowledge the editor of publications in which the following poems first appeared:

"Shedding Our Skins" from Shedding Our Skins, Moon Pony Press, Nard Taiz, ed., Tucson, Arizona, 1989; "How It Got Planted" and "The Stillness of Bees" from How the World Is Given to Us, Moon Pony Press, Nard Taiz, ed., Santa Cruz, California, 1998.

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