Gary Snyder - Selected Poems
A Walk
Sunday is the only day we don’t work:
Mules farting around the meadow,
Murphy fishing,
The tent flaps in the warm
Early sun: I’ve eaten breakfast and I’ll
take a walk
To Benson Lake. Packed a lunch,
Goodbye. Hopping on creekbed boulders
Up the rock throat three miles
Piute Creek -
In steep gorge glacier-slick rattlesnake country
Jump, land by a pool, trout skitter,
the clear sky. Deer tracks.
Bad places by falls, boulders big as houses,
Lunch tied to belt,
I stemmed up a crack and almost fell
But rolled out safe on a ledge
an ambled on.
Quail chicks freeze underfoot, color of stone
Then run cheep! away, hen quail fussing.
Craggy west end of Benson Lake - after edging
Past dark creek pools one a long white slope -
Lookt down in the ice-black lake
lined with cliff
From far above: deep shimmering trout.
A lone duck in a gunsightpass
steep side hill
Through slide-aspen and talus, to the east end,
Down to grass, wading a wide smooth stream
Into camp. At last.
By the rusty three-year-
Ago left-behind cookstove
Of the old trail crew,
Stoppt and swam and ate my lunch.
After Work
The shack and a few trees
float in the blowing fog
I pull out your blouse,
warm my cold hands
on your breasts.
you laugh and shudder
peeling garlic by the
hot iron stove.
bring in the axe, the rake,
the wood
we'll lean on the wall
against each other
stew simmering on the fire
as it grows dark
drinking wine.
As for poets
As for poets
The Earth Poets
who write small poems,
need help from no man.
The Air Poets
play out the swiftest gales
and sometimes loll in the eddies.
Poem after poem,
curling back on the same thrust.
At fifty below
fuel oil won't flow
and propane stays in the tank.
Fire Poets
burn at absolute zero
fossil love pumped backup
The first
Water Poet
stayed down six years.
He was covered with seaweed.
The life in his poem
left millions of tiny
different tracks
criss-crossing through the mud.
With the Sun and Moon
in his belly,
The Space Poet
sleeps.
No end to the sky-
but his poems,
like wild geese,
fly off the edge.
A Mind Poet
stays in the house.
The house is empty
and it has no walls.
The poem
is seen from all sides,
Everywhere,
at once.
Axe Handles
One afternoon the last week in April
showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
one-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
without a handle, in the shop
and go gets it, and wants it for his own
a broken off axe handle behind the door
is long enough for a hatchet,
we cut it to length and take it
with the hatchet head
and working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
with the hatchet, and the phrase
first learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
by checking the handle
of the axe we cut with--"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature" -- in the
Preface: "In making the handle
of an axe
by cutting wood with an axe
the model is indeed near at hand."
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
translated that and taught it years ago
and I see Pound was an axe
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
and my son a handle, soon
to be shaping again, model
and tool, craft of culture,
how we go on.
For All
Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up,
holding boots, pack on,
sunshine, ice in the shallows,
northern rockies.
Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes
cold nose dripping
singing inside
creek music, heart music,
smell of sun on gravel.
I pledge allegiance
I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
with joyful interpenetration for all.
Hay For The Horses
He had driven half the night
from far down San Joaquin
through Mariposa, up the
dangerous mountain roads,
and pulled in at eight a.m.
with his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
we stacked the bales up clean
to splintery redwood rafters
high in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
out in the hot corral,
--the old mare nosing lunchpails,
grasshoppers crackling in the weeds --
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."
How Poetry Comes to Me
It comes blundering over the
boulders at night, it stays
frightened outside the
range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
edge of the light
OLD BONES
Out there walking round, looking out for food,
a rootstock, a birdcall, a seed that you can crack
plucking, digging, snaring, snagging,
barely getting by,
no food out there on dusty slopes of scree-
carry some—look for some,
go for a hungry dream.
Deer bone, Dall sheep,
bones hunger home.
Out there somewhere
a shrine for the old ones,
the dust of the old bones,
old songs and tales.
What we ate—who ate what—
how we all prevailed.
RIPRAP
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
They Drink Tea
There are those who love to get dirty
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work.
And those who stay clean,
just appreciate things,
breakfast they have milk
and juice at night.
There are those who do both,
they drink tea.