But before the new year, the poet takes stock, looking decades back, here in “Core Samples: Poems” ($15 in hardcover, self-published, available at The Bookstore in downtown Chico and MONCA, the Museum of Northern California Art).
A trip to San Diego Zoo (seeing “the muscles flow like liquids through/ those tiger-black stripes”), a train ride across the country (“There is no snow/ this year there is/ no snow in Colorado”), a trip to Viet Nam (in Hanoi, a Brit “tells us over/ beer in the Metropole bar/ ‘Figure anyone here who ain’t/ working is watching’”). And there’s a gallimaufry of miscellaneous poems.
Death haunts many of the poems, such as in the sonnet sequence about the stuff left behind after the death of the poet’s grandfather Merle in 1985. And the Vietnam Memorial: “I must claim my war the one/ I did not choose to fight in….// I sing of Disobedience/ of Mom and Pop’s shame/ of all the dead ones you know/ that bullets gave a name// Where agent Orange and FBI/ stand cheek by jowl with CREEP/ A big black wall in Washington/ where the living go to weep.”
“All of us are fatally human,” the poet says elsewhere. “We must never rush out to prove it.”
Does the poet’s walk foreshadow the future?
“And so at some distant New Year,/ I will walk all the dogs I’ve ever known,/ I will step out of my ancient shoes,/ I will find a rope swing and work myself/ into a spectacular blue-toed arc,/ and on the apogee of a January One,/ I will howl once and expand forever.”
