On Peaks

I've read Gary Snyder's poetry occasionally but with satisfaction as part of the process of what I might term living through my history, reading his first couple of books as a byproduct of encountering him through the distorting glass of Kerouac's Dharma Bums in my early teens, and out of a generalized passion for poetry basedon a then intense desire to be a poet; then reading Turtle Island in the mid 70's, the last historical moment when Snyder's world-view came closest to becoming "established," and he won the Pulitzer Prize; and now, after all the intervening decades of our retrenchment, in Danger on Peaks, a book which I guess is already a year or two old. The true north of Snyder's approach to Buddhism gives the latest work a commonality with the earliest that is not the same thing as a lack of development, philosophically or poetically.

I loved the following poem because I've driven the Grapevine in varying degrees of awareness so many times, and the poem seems to distill all of that experience, my own and that of the millions of others who travel that river:

In the Santa Clarita Valley

Like skinny wildweed flowers sticking up
hexagonal "Denny's" sign
starry "Carl's"
loopy "McDonald's"
eight-petaled yellow "Shell"
blue-and-white "Mobil" with a big red "O"

growing in the asphalt riparian zone
by the soft roar of the flow
of Interstate 5.

The play of the apostrophes in the poem, the open-heartedness toward the trademarks as if they were phenomena in the natural world, or really the tuning to the way the nature emerges in the man-made world in spite of or even through the commercial attempt to own the world, really delight me.

Then the following, with further awareness of the motorized world as a kind of anonymous nature, but this time a death-dealing nature -- also a perfect Buddhist obituary:

For Anthea Corinne Snyder Lowry

1932-2002

She was on the Marin County Grand Jury, heading to a meeting,
south of Petaluma on the 101. The pickup ahaead of her lost a grass-
mower off the back. She pulled onto the shoulder, and walked right
out into the lane to take it off. That had always been her way. Struck
by a speedy car, an instant death.




White egrets standing there
always standing there
there at the crossing

on the Petaluma River