Listen: "A friend who left for the East Coast two years/ ago has flown back to Chico to take photos/ of Mount Lassen exactly one hundred years after/ its catastrophic eruption. For a while/ it feels as if everything is a reenactment of something that has already happened: even dumping/ a skitter of Raisin Bran into a bowl/ ... or trying on sneakers takes on/ the aura of a ritual."
Well, "Are you trying/ to deny time and change, to say that death/ will have no authority here, or are you/ celebrating the fact that everything is/ in flux and ungraspable, or is the season/ doing one or the other of these things for you?"
In "Earthly Delights: Poems" ($17.95 in paperback from Princeton University Press; also for Amazon Kindle) melancholy seems ever present for something lost or just beyond the horizon.
So, in "Early Morning, Upper Bidwell Park," the poet writes, "When God made the world he did it like this/ world-making in the daytime/ world-undoing at night// And it has occurred to me that we might be living/ in one of the undoings...."
Elsewhere, "When the Senator Theatre closed in 1999 in Chico, California,/ the last film to be shown was 'American Beauty,' and so I went, for the last screening./ I went to take in the last images, to feel the last light, to be a part/ of the end of something, to be, I suppose, a kind of witness, and to be a part/ of that crowd of others...."
Then a postscript to a poem called "Fire": "The world will end in fire, not ice,/ William Tecumseh Sherman said,/ as we, horizons glowing red,/ inhaled the ash of Paradise."
Now the poet sings of the "melancholy night, sagging with the heaviness/ Of summer, and of silence, of things we cannot guess,/ Rocked gently on the azure by the wind's caress,/ The trembling tree, the nightingale's mournful address."
