On The Olympic Coast

Part I Walking in the burnt-over forest near Shi-shi Beach I see gutted trees growing in knobby shapes They have been half-dead since the Forties But strips of bark still carry sap to a few green branches Behind me the old conifers stand like cathedral pillars But in the huge trunks only the inner bark has live, multiplying cells The wood is made of cells that stiffened with fibers and became plugged up with resin They died and became support elements for the plan of the tree The bark is layers of corky, plugged-up cells built up in furrowed patterns The trunks of these monsters are mostly cellulose Standing there in columnar form, or down on the forest floor, they are uninvolved There is more living matter in this rain forest than if the land were simply covered in green slime Nature taught itself to stack layers of leaf, and thus give room for more life The whole point was to trick as much matter as possible into the web But most of the matter that made it is only half-involved Dead logs littering the seashore Old stalks of beached kelp, studded with barnacle knobs Dried sea confetti stinking to the sky Shampoo bottle from New Zealand, used by someone on a container ship Glass globes that floated fishnets miles wide Wood nubs and coke-bottle beads, smoothed in gem tumbler of sand and wave A deer jawbone with only one tooth: the tooth was deposited like a diatom's calcareous shell in the chalk cliff of the body Oddments thrown from anywhere where things were in the thick of being made All this matter was coaxed into the dance for a while But the moves were hard to follow, and the stuff got butt-slammed to the side Most of the dancers at any time are forced to be wallflowers, uninvolved Like most of the contents of my mind Snags and deadwood at the bend of a stream So much is not allowed into my mind at any one time And the thoughts that manage to trickle through are me: they are the part that is allowed to be alive And even this much of me is only walking Just an uninspired two-legged creature walking on the puncheon trail, in relation to the uninvolved trees, uninvolved What can I do to be more alive? Something morbid, intriguing, slightly repelling? Dostoyevskian convoluted moral retch trip? Or go to galleries and see people's spirits lodged in paintings? Or read some thorny book and get a furrowed brow? Everything will get subsumed under the Uninvolved No use smoking Maryjane if your sense of wonder is gone Any communication repeated loses meaning While an auctioneer with light-up necktie raises funds for the Chamber of Commerce And legal messengers streak across town carrying Hanford payoffs You are just parked there, clueless When you are off on your trip to be active in the Democratic Party The Rush Limbaugh audience thinks you are badly-painted scenery Even screaming crowds are frozen in their screaming Judgments are flying thick and fast; people get stymied deep inside If you can't keep up with the green edge, you will have to be wood Part II I've got to get this stupid preoccupation with matter out of my head. It is the malady of analytical man By seeing the tree as a column of cellulose, it's easy to be helpless while others are cutting it down In a good dance there is no strict boundary between the quick and the dead I even look for materiality in the social sphere; that is sure to get me nowhere Suppose the arms-merchant economy is the provider of some people's "needs" If it's just a structure to deal out resources, why does it have reproductive functions? You may think it's just part of the scenery, but to IT, you are just part of the scenery What a mess being the green edge and the left-behind stuff for each other! The trees are blessed, if only we can spare them Their column of wood never fails to hold the green growth high But our materiality has spines and turrets that come piercing through tender bark The green edge spreads wide and dangerous into other hearts Singers join to make slow-floating circles in the mind's sky SINGERS: join to make slow-floating circles in the mind's sky!