He left the cities behind. He trudged into the wilderness seeking the god whose words are weaved in wood, his backpack like a steely carapace shielding him from the sun. He joined the serried grasses of the field in their slow green war of survival and destruction. He sent us letters, etched with a stubby pencil, printed because we could not read his writing, a loose plenum of graphite bones treading the white water of the page. He wrote that he was trying to live à terre like the king who spends his life in the saddle. He wrote that he was dedicating himself to the transcription of realities. He wrote that he was weary of “endless first person confessionals wrung from the pistils of wilting flower souls” In his free moments he would collect metaphors like beanbags and toss them about: “the ribs of the earth bunch together” “mountains gather like lowing cattle” “the sun is a great golden cock and the moon the pale abyss of an empty womb.” He formed phrases like freshly bought candles, their wicks still clean, calling them sutras rather maxims since he like the eastern flavor of the word: “breath falls from the lungs and is not caught” “it takes more than two legs to leave” “the rain does not choose the forest or the plain.” From the ashen and igneous earth he excavated melted glass bottles, decanters, demijohns, forgotten figurines. In the high grasses he lay like a planchet awaiting the stamp of whatever realm would claim him first, to be spent accordingly on boots wine tallow or mutton. In his dreams he was a hard kernel of a man, no meat within the seed. In his dreams he was a meaty man with love flourishing in his soul. In his nightmares, from the dizzying height of the falcon’s aerie, a host of many-footed symbols came rushing toward him, furry and junctured and carrying flags, a youth with the wings of a bat, a meniscus moon, a japanese dagger, a broken bird, an old man with fool’s gold in the pinks of his eyes… He wrote that by summer his money would be gone and he would travel south with the sun to sleep on the warm beaches among the mottled shells, to mix among the dark races and drink their strong beer and laugh with dark laughter for their women until the moon was replete and brimming. The rain does not choose the forest or the plain. The tiger does not know that it is tiger named. --- Appeared in Berkeley Poets Cooperative