house posts
One world, here and beyond us so that reaching for it, into it
hog-ties the shaman blind in his blanket face-down on the floor, seals out every sliver of light from the windows to sound the rattles
from everywhere, the muffled voices, sparks and crescendos erratic in the air. Whether spirits
or apparatus who can say with the fine threads of the four directions stretched among the supplicants miraculously intact next morning, and by morning
we're boating, skeptical, talking metaphor, joking. There's our parallel universe: the bluffs
of arbutus and shore pine slipping past, the island we're approaching friends call
"going to Greece" when we go there for its shimmering slopes in high summer of dry moss and gold, flattened grasses, its hollows here and there as welcoming
as a wife's body, as sharply aromatic. Wet rock, yarrow, manzanita.
I've no vows, no chanting but this to hold these shocking constancies, expanses, open
spaces between the trees complete and sadder than made places...
the trees just where
house posts would be.
Stepping amidst them, within, I'm over- hearing my own voice disown me, "yes,
you belong here but cannot stay."
-- John Pass