Excerpts from The Heron Place by David Oates

I.

on the favored walk
along the river

the place
I once saw a heron

pleases me
as much
as the heron did
 

          ~  ~  ~
 

now
it will always have a name
the heron place

or sometimes
found
under green alders bending

or sometimes
remember
 

          ~  ~  ~
 

and in the name
the story, a small one

I can turn it over stonewise
it fits a palm nicely
swings with a rhythm
while walking

II

and if I remember you, too,
O most beautiful man

your places
that comforted me

your rising on wings
of affectionate flesh

will memory heal me
as your touch did?
 

          ~  ~  ~
 

I pass over and over this ground

wondering how to make of it
a good story

a good story
one that swings
stonewise

stone
fitting the
wandering palm

palm
needing to hold on to something
though not, perhaps,
to own it
 

          ~  ~  ~
 

the drift of a sentence uncovers one of your words
I hear myself say it
in just your voice

VI

O muir american, seeking wilderness
where on earth no one has forerun you

(while from the next ridge
watch thousand-generation eyes
made of the earth of the place)

fantasied emptiness
to be filled one first time
by your tumescent pioneer

O muir american
as you imagined, it has become

for no-story is its own kind of tale
uncreating
wherever you walk
 

          ~  ~  ~

 
yet leaves tread sunshine into soil
humans burn and village, vanish and reappear
animals exist their part of the burden
narratives of forest and brushland unfold
fallow and flower, footpad and wing
suffering and delight and darkness

the eldertale
this silly solo yarn of yearning
can only for a while unravel
 

          ~  ~  ~
 

and didn’t I muir smugly off your trail
a clattering emporium of aluminum and vanity

didn’t I think in your footsteps
maybe here no one has ever been
maybe here at last the virgin wilderness

never making the connection
where there is no past
why should there be a future

if everything can begin right now
it can end now too

deflowered, deforested,
merriwethered, booned,
consumed
 

          ~  ~  ~
 

the wilderness commodity rises and falls, unstable,
endangered, hoarded, almost used up
artifice thin as theory, a form of money

while the wild renews itself
            in every pulse
prolix as a poet
            incontinent as a teenager
generous
            as the black interstellary god-space between us

the wild
            in batholith, beach sand, well-palmed cobble
the wild
            in ant-pinched bud and phloemy stem
            rising whole handsbreadths to the heavens
the wild
            in sky-float seedlet like a hopeful asterisk
            or bruised pome thudding groundward with the others
the wild
            in weedlot and forest and freeway median,
            sandy waste, peak-point, and salt-deep sea
            in dreams and three-part inventions, wasps nests, wrensongs,
            saintly or libertine excess or restraint

unhurried, unabated, mildly poisoned, buggy, tattered, unconcerned
the wild
            works
            and weaves
            and waits
 

          ~  ~  ~
 

we ask
what will the world be
who will be making it

what will our babies grow into
who will be gnawing down the world around them

look: this supermarket of shoppers
every woman a queen of prophecy and song
each child a messiah, every man a Rama

look: forgetting has robbed you

look: the wild of the mind
where pattern and delight are always arising

look: you are the makers
you can give it away and be rich

see it growing silently beside the large pines
settling with unconscious sigh by lions where they rest
widening like vistas of shining river
distilling in that moment
you, O tender human
into everything that is beyond, too much, too big

you
into all that is immediate and small and necessary
O tender human
possessing and being possessed

ourselves the source
we pity the ones
who only acquire

ourselves the source
we give and let go

our children become creators
not mere consumers
and their world becomes more
than the leavings of locusts

VIII

heron lodge is a roam
and a still standing

if a bright creek blanket the deep blue rock
with a loam and a reach

the wing will content
to the body, shape

a stride, a watch,
a tip

the head a sloped slip
and a kill

and another stride standing
mudloam over placid
savage blueheart bedstone