More.

FACING NORTH

   Ninety billion galaxies in this one tiny universe –

   a billion seconds make thirty-two years.

   No matter how many ways we conceive it,

   this generous wedge called Ursa Major

   more than fills my sight.

   But now, as I turn to put out the lights

   and give my dog her bedtime cookie,

   my eyes become the handle of the great Milky Way,

   and carry it into the house.

Dan Gerber

Motion.

The wind abides nowhere.

Or it isn’t the wind;

it is the motion of the mind

through pine boughs.

Dan Gerber

Missing.

HAUNTED

And how bewildered is any womb-born creature that has to fly.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

The bats who hang in the dark, chittering

from our eaves, seem

members of our house we haven’t

yet had time to name. We feel them

in the night air around us and catch

a glimpse of the movement

of their wings in the half-light of the moon.

Mouse angels I have called them,

terrifying and warm and mythical,

seeming almost terrified themselves,

skittering after the echoes of

their own voices homing in

on the smaller creatures of the night

and also larger winged beings, hunting

their bat blood to stay alive.

 

This morning I found one of them asleep,

hanging from the inside of a window screen

in our half-dark bedroom, and

wondered how it had gotten in and

why it wasn’t sleeping with the other

members of its choir, if it had been

expelled or simply gotten lost.

I covered it with a child’s

plastic drinking cup and slid a large

jack-of-diamonds playing card under

the lip, then I carried it out to the yard.

The bat landed on its back, spreading

the intricate framework of its wings

to right itself while I waited

to see if it could fly, as I remembered reading

that rabid bats can’t, and how my friend Ted,

having been bitten trying to help a fallen bat,

had needed a battery of painful injections to

sear the rabies away.

The bat struggled up on its pinions,

dragging itself through the grass as if

trying to reach me for help,

but I, fearing disease and for our dogs,

killed it with a shovel, not then knowing

that a bat can’t take flight from the ground,

must have a perch to receive the

grace of air under its wings. I could have

released it in the crotch of a tree, on a

window ledge. . . .

I picked up the skin of a ripped balloon

on the tip of the shovel and

carried it to the trash, protecting

our house and this faltering world

from what may have been just the

physics of being a bat. Maybe

the world won’t miss one bat. Maybe

I did the right thing. But the world, my world,

is missing it, crawling toward me for life.

Dan Gerber

Calms.

Firchau, Molson, 2008

NATURAL WORLD

There is nothing in the picture

you don’t see. That is, there

is nothing in the picture, but

you can’t see it, as there

is also nothing beyond the picture that

you can see. As you watch

the picture and begin to notice

more, the nothing grows less, but

never less than nothing. For you,

the picture has no separate

being, and, like you, the

nothing in the picture exists.

We teach a child to see a ball, a tree,

a dog, sitting at the moment.

The dog knows little of our confusion, and

calms us with her eyes.

Dan Gerber

Smell.

Wyeth, Light Wash, 1969

WHAT DANNY SAID

When asked what he’d miss most,

having to leave the house he’d known

the whole nine years of his life,

he squinted and looked off a little

beyond where we were just then,

and said, “The smell. I think

it’s the smell I’ll miss most.

Maybe we can take that with us.”

Dan Gerber

More.

Hammick, Night Raft, 2013

FACING NORTH

   Ninety billion galaxies in this one tiny universe –

   a billion seconds make thirty-two years.

   No matter how many ways we conceive it,

   this generous wedge called Ursa Major

   more than fills my sight.

   But now, as I turn to put out the lights

   and give my dog her bedtime cookie,

   my eyes become the handle of the great Milky Way,

   and carry it into the house.

Dan Gerber

Move.

Chatham, Tamalpais in the Fog, 2001

The CACHE

Behind the house in a field

there's a metal box I buried

full of childhood treasure, a map

of my secret place, a few lead pennies

from 1943.

The rest I've forgotten,

forgotten even the exact spot

I covered with moss and loam.

 

Now I'm back and twenty years

have made so little difference

I suspect they never happened,

this face in the mirror

aged with pencil and putty.

I suspect even

the box has moved as a mole would move

to a new place long ago.

Dan Gerber

Ever-intensified.

I am always returning to the edge of water,
lapping at the loam of a bank under pine needles,
and slapping at the bellies of dock planks.
Or I’m looking into one of those still, black ponds,
which seems to me like a pupil of the planet,
through which it watches the other stars
and finally our own silent faces,
going down to its ever-intensified heart.

Dan Gerber

After.

ADVICE

You know how, after it rains,
my father told me one August afternoon
when I struggled with something
hurtful my best friend had said,
how worms come out and
crawl all over the sidewalk
and it stays a big mess
a long time after it’s over
if you step on them?

Leave them alone,
he went on to say,
after clearing his throat,
and when the rain stops,
they crawl back into the ground.

Dan Gerber

Quiver.

PRESENCE 

Something about the brush pile
thirty yards ahead beside the two-
track through the aspen grove,
something too dark, too dense, as
if the glance of a witch
in wait—something out of place.

I whispered the dogs to sit and stay
and held my hand, palm
down, between them to
give my command more weight.

My first thought, always, was of bear. I’ve
followed the trail of ripped-open
sheepskins, scattered like
piles of bloody popcorn, when
the Basque herders bring
their flocks down from the
high-mountain pastures
in this late part of summer.

We waited, and the obscure shape
swayed, though not as if in wind.
There was no wind,
only caution becoming fear as
whatever it was rocked
back and forth four times,
building momentum to rise like
a mountain through geologic time, its
murky ridges spreading high against
the pale green of the aspens with
branches of its own, more massive
than these slender trees could bear,
and under them,
two black-silver beads, in sunlight blacker
than the darkness they shone out of, sensing
something about our being there.

I felt the dogs quiver, or
maybe it was me.

I wondered how the moose might
see us, three frozen beings
pretending to be small trees or
shrubs, pretending not to breathe,
waiting for him to decide
if we were a threat worth
being threatened by.

I thought of our neighbor, the blacksmith,
Johnny Reddan, stomped to death
the summer before, out for a
short walk after supper, told
his wife he’d be back before dark.
They found his body the following noon,
a cow with calves, the ranger
said, it must have been a cow.

I heard an airplane sounding
angry above the trees. Then
it relented to a hard-edged hum and
hummed on for several minutes, it seemed.

I heard the kyrie of a red-tailed hawk
and wondered what she might be
seeing of our standoff in
this rivery break of
ranch road through the trees.

Two years before, a herd of
thirteen moose, five cows
and eight lumbering bulls,
spent an idle Christmas on our
snow-covered lawn, rubbing
on the clapboards of the house, nudging
the drift boat on its trailer, locking
antlers, aimlessly pushing each other
around, with no agenda. It seemed
so safe, with the solid walls
around us, smiling at
the mangy pelts and
homely mugs, that docile
consciousness at play.

Time was all around us now, meaning
one more siphoned breath of
the air the moose was breathing too.
I wondered if he could smell us—nothing
moving anywhere.

A fly buzzed by my ear.

Was the bull waiting
for us to break the spell?
His mooseness was implacable,
the light behind him from the trees.

Eight miles south in the town of Driggs,
Deb was at the Safeway for tomatoes,
lettuce, bacon, and bread, expecting
I’d be home for lunch.

The dogs were so still I almost
forgot them, their noses locked
on the moose like
pointers on a grouse.

I scanned the grove for a
gap between two slender trunks,
just wide enough for me.

And then there was a breeze.
The grass heads nodded. A
sudden flutter through the
leathery leaves—one
breath was all, as
tentative as our own. It seemed
enough to move the scene.

The bull swayed again
and swung himself one step into the forest
and then another. We heard
dry branches whisper and snap
as he plowed his way,
a primeval wave of midday
darkness through the fragile trees.

The dogs stayed close on my heels
the last quarter mile through the aspens
till the track opened out onto a prairie
of scrubby sage and yellow arrowroot.

Dan Gerber

Imagine.

Chatham, Marshall Ridge, 2001

OFTEN I IMAGINE the EARTH

Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.

Dan Gerber

Moved.

Verdine, Through the Thicket, Across the Meadow, To the Woods, 2013

The CACHE

Behind the house in a field

there's a metal box I buried

full of childhood treasure, a map

of my secret place, a few lead pennies

from 1943.

The rest I've forgotten,

forgotten even the exact spot

I covered with moss and loam.

Now I'm back and twenty years

have made so little difference

I suspect they never happened,

this face in the mirror

aged with pencil and putty.

I suspect even

the box has moved as a mole would move

to a new place long ago.

Dan Gerber

Flitting.

ONE and ONE MAKE ONE

Flitting between them,
for hours now,
the spotted towhee can't decide
which of the two birds
in the two
glass panels,
in each of the two
French doors,
he's more in love with.

Dan Gerber

Beyond.

Wyeth, The Porch, 1970

REFUGE

I watched the sunset on Mars 
through a space-probe camera's eye.

It dropped down so quickly --
like a diver in a slow-motion film

plunging into darkness 
through a splash of light.

I heard a soft knocking 
at my door.

Then an acorn struck
and rolled forever down the roof.

A crow cawed faintly
beyond the closed window.

Autumn, and the fire
flaps like a heavy canvas in the wind.

Dan Gerber

Grasped.

A WALK

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.

going far beyond the road I have begun,

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;

it has an inner light, even from a distance-

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,

into something else, which, hardly sensing it,

we already are; a gesture waves us on

answering our own wave…

but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Move.

Ruscha, Shooting Star, 1984

The CACHE

Behind the house in a field
there’s a metal box I buried
full of childhood treasure, a map
of my secret place, a few lead pennies
from 1943.

The rest I’ve forgotten,
forgotten even the exact spot
I covered with moss and loam.

Now I’m back and twenty years
have made so little difference
I suspect they never happened,
this face in the mirror
aged with pencil and putty.

I suspect even
the box has moved as a mole would move
to a new place long ago.

Dan Gerber

Indolence.

IN MICHIGAN

1

Here like the tropics
in summer
in the forest, in the lake
or where the forest ends
a desert of dry grass and stones
over dirt roads, the heat
making you one with
the air
and thus not being one
separate
from that which surrounds you

You rise in the early morning
and for an hour
feel yourself
the boy again
in love with summer
the heat, the baking sun
the indolence of planning
nothing for tomorrow.

2
I never know
my father as a young man
forty-four when I was born
fifty as young as I remember him
but in the brown photgraphs
from "the Great War"
he is young, younger than I
and he calls me back
         a dream that couldn't escape
the businessman
who rose every dawn
to his last years

Dan Gerber

His.

Magritte, The Sixteenth of September, 1956

POSTPRANDIAL

When my dog and I
step outside after dinner to pee,
a frightened squirrel leaps Nureyev-like
from limb to branch to twig
all the way to the top of the oak
while a crow holds his perch,
deep in the foliage, cawing,
because he's a crow
and because these to arrogant Earth-dogs
are peeing under his tree.

Dan Gerber

Why.

The reason you do not clearly understand the time being is that you
think of time only as passing.
              Dogen (1200–1253) 

We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.
              Wallace Stevens, “Man Carrying Thing”

Winter Solstice—the sun
stopped for a moment—
can you feel its light stretching—
as it shrugs off its migration
and turns back north toward the pole?

                   * * *

On this rock, just the right
distance from the nearest star,
sheltered by Jupiter and kept in season
by the steadying moon,
being moves through my body
like clouds, arriving in one shape,
drifting off as another.

I don’t remember being born,
only the great dog
whose fur I clung to
before the first day of school.

Memory accounts
for space, not time.
It records the quality and angle
of light, the keen, metallic scent of wind
through porch screens—the wailing
as it rises—the warmth and texture of air—
the weather and sometimes
whether or not it was a Tuesday,
but never how long it lasted—or
how many years ago—only
how it felt—alone in that moment.
And the sound of waves breaking.

We see time past as Euclidian—moments
of solitude with no date affixed—
long afternoons of childhood in no time at all,
without knowing that
because of the moment—now in memory—
you will always be seven in that place.

Our solitude—being alone
with the one you knew there—
our loneliness—being there
without him.

Two billion seconds of life
now, on a planet only
four and a half billion years
old—and every atom on loan
to it much older than that.

In the beginning, all that was
was too hot for atoms -- too tightly
packed to let go of its light --
as if the universe
had come out of the other side of a black hole --
heading back to where it began
over ungraspable distance
right now -- and not at all
far from home.

Every creation story I know
comes out of the dark --
the brune garden in which light blooms.
Dark matter puling the chaotic
energy apart -- breaking the prison
of its own concentration --

giving it space to be a wave.

                   * * *

The master equation
of the Standard Model of particle physics
accounts for everything
except gravity -- and gravity
accounts for everything --
irresistible center of the spheres
and stars, on and among which
we go on -- curving our
straight course -- as it draws
the low-gliding hawk
irresistibly
back together with its shadow.

Imagine Earth
as the nucleus of a hydrogen atom
from which we're looking out -- hoping
for a glimpse of the single electron
whirling around in its orbit
and -- like Neptune -- simply too
distant to see -- green pea
in a green field a half-mile away.

Now in confusion -- now
in a wave -- a thousand blackbirds
rise and veer above a stubble field --
their wings like obsidian in the sun.

Illusory solidity of the world
and things -- the chair I'm on --
its atoms whizzing in arcs,
repelling each other while I sit
musing in this electromagnetic storm --
a chair.

So much space inside an atom,
why can't I reach through this wall?
Is a honeybee
one being, or an element
of one being?

Particles -- shadows of waves
in water moving over bright sand.

                   * * *

As a child I witnessed a tiny sort of
particle accelerator
in the cold, blue light
of The Lone Ranger
on black-and-white TV -- a beam
of electrons through a cathode tube
splayed out by a magnet to become
Tonto and Silver crossing
a phosphorescent screen.

Every particle in their bodies represnets
the distillation of 100
billion bits from the big bang that
immolated themselves
to become light.

Now even quantum theory agrees,
Form Is Emptiness -- mostly.

                   * * *

In the glimmering domain
of the Summer Triangle -- buoyed up
by crickets and frogs --
Vega drags her rhomboid harp
through an isthmus in the Milky Way.

We need our quietest hours to hear Earth
turning night into day --
to feel it gather its waters against
the pull of the moon --

hydrogen holding waters together,
and we -- made mostly of water --
hydrogen molecules drawn to each other --
wrapping up a bit of breathable
air in their hydraulic embrace --
holding me together, and you,
with a little oxygen drawn in.

                   * * *

How is it that an atom of hydrogen --
the primary substance we all know --
can be said to weigh less
than the sum of its parts,
and does that mean that the total mass
of the known universe -- mostly hydrogen --
would weigh less if we could weight it
all together at once?

                   * * *

Matter appears to be jealous of light --
every particle mad to escape its mass
to be just the light by which we
see our world -- without self --
without the distractions of a you
and a me, apparently eternal
like an electron -- to have
no substance in which to decay.

The mysterious shore across the great void --
a scary place from all you've heard,
all you've imagined --
never quite clearly in view,
and no one you know
has been there.
And how with you endure your thoughts
in the great dark absence
of everything you've known?

Like the terminals of the battery
in a lamp,
matter and antimatter
cancel each other out
to become light.
Why anything at all should exist
is a riddle we haven't yet solved.

                   * * *

Going and coming, the full moon
and rising sun
greet each other
across the plane of the morning.
"Till later," says the moon.
"I'll be along," says the sun.
"I'll be around," says the earth.
"Take your time."

                   * * *

Near the pole
the needle of the magnetic compass
spins like drain water
in its dying frenzy --
finally so close to home.

Dan Gerber

Napping.

AUGUST AFTERNOON: NAPPING in a CABIN near ENNIS, MONTANA

Seven different shades of green

well up and reach out

and wrap their slender arms

around my shoulders and thighs.

My friend Jim asks if I have a pencil.

I realize it’s only a dream,

and I’m not obliged to write it down.

I don’t want to wake up yet,

to leave the tendrils I’m loving.

A horse nickers in the deep summer grass,

and I’m willing to believe—

though he stamps his foot,

and I hear the swish of it through the window—

that he’s grazing in the green of my dream.

Now I hear someone trying to start

a rusty old pump-wheel,

but it turns out to be sandhill cranes

yodeling extravagantly

from the bog beyond the river willows.

“Do you have a pencil,” he asks.

Dan Gerber