Poets Inside

Selections from Jon Anderson and Steve Straight

The Scope

Lesson

Standing by the side of the road in Jenner, California,

hitchhiking. At least that is the idea.

So few cars pass that one may not stop today.

It’s sunny. Goats dispersed across the hillside behind me

chew their way up the green hill gradually, attentive.

The sea breeze carries phrases of seagull chatter

from below a cliff. In my pack are clothes, water,

oranges, three loaves of sourdough, peanuts, cheese.

Hung below the pack, a tent. I peel an orange,

tucking the continents of rind into a loose pocket.

Drops of juice fall onto the sand and on my boots.

A bee lands on the lip of a yellow blossom and walks

inside it. It emerges, dusted with pollen, drunk,

surprised by the generosity of light.

— Steve Straight

from “The Water Carrier”

The Water Carrier

Lugging the forty-eight-pound Poland Spring water jug up from the cellar,

it strikes me how much of my life is spent transporting water.

How many gallons of it carried to the garden, to the flower beds, to bushes

and trees, lately with blue grains of fertilizer

dissolved in it, trip after trip to the linden tree, trying

to restore its vigor. How many pots of pasta water

lifted from stove to sink, how many cups of lemon tea

delivered to my wife over twenty-five hundred days of marriage.

My wife, an Aquarian, reminds me that nothing compares

to the out and out hauling by women and other slaves

over the centuries, for cooking, washing, bathing,

slopping, drinking. Tons of it per person per life,

a life stooped and shortened by it. I see films

of people yoked between pails of it and feel sorry

when it spills over the sides in the normal rhythm

of walking, all that spilled having to be carried again.

The Buddhists tell us it all comes down to that

and chopping wood. Carry it only to carry it,

mindful of the watering can handle’s convexness

and smoothness, the way the Poland Spring jug

hugs my chest, the lemon and honey steam

rising from the tea. No mistake.

Seventy-five percent of us is liquid, of course,

in that perfect proportion we share with the Earth

and the water it carries through space. I log the miles

with it every day, have cameled it across the Mojave

in an air-conditioned Dodge, kayaked it down a stretch

of the Connecticut, carried more than my share of it

soaked to the bone in the Burren, in County Clare,

wondering why the Earth needed it moved a few more miles

of Ireland in my hat and hair, my shirt, pants, and shoes.

I’ve spent sick days, too, moving it only from

the hot side of the bed to the cool one, sweating,

and reminding myself of the funny dictum to force fluids,

my favorite by far the homemade orangeade

my mother brought me during bouts of tonsillitis.

Most days I slake my important thirst at water coolers

in hallways, or from the big glass pitcher of sun tea

my wife has squeezed a lemon into, whenever

my internal dipstick reads “add.”

And what about the thickets behind left fields,

the edges of woods along highways, the sides of trees

and railroad tracks in moonlight where I have left it,

lightened my load, as they say. That I was meant to deliver it

then and there is yet another argument for design. And

although I can’t transport it like the albatross over

thousands of miles of ocean, or the great thunderclouds

bowling overhead, sucking it from the earth and racing it

across vast expanses of sky, I am one of the many small

but efficient vessels on the planet, respirators. Even

now in my next exhalation I send some vapor forth,

on its way to become the next cloud.

— Steve Straight

from “The Water Carrier”

Postcard from Chimney Pond

Climbed the talus around the pond last night—so many pebbles

around a puddle from the views of Baxter Peak, but down here

chunks of granite as big as the small house I grew up in, all

jumbled, jutting out of cold, clear water and piled up towards

the stars. Silent lightning split the sky far north. Scrambled

as far up the rock throat as I safely could and then some.

Slept beneath the cliffs. Had a dream of you so real that

for a long time after waking up, it felt good to have seen you again

— Jon Andersen

from “Stomp and Sing”

You Must

You must have a hope

that will let you stomp and sing

at any cold dawn.

You must not wait

to love the student who loves you

and would like to kill you.

You must read the story again

and again to the child

who receives you with a bovine stare.

You must get up

every day to punch in

not dreaming on transcendence,

not desiring new heroes or gods,

not looking the other way,

but looking for the other way

and ready to talk to everyone on the line.

You must not wait

for official approval

nor general consensus

to rage. You must

come again to kneel

in shiny, rock-strewn soil

not to pray, but to plant.

Yes, even now

as ice caps melt and black top

goes soft in the sun

you must prepare for the harvest.