Gerard Sarnat is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee whose work has appeared in Rattle, Gargoyle, Brooklyn Review, Tokyo Poetry Journal and The New York Times, and is collected in four books. More of his work is at gerardsarnat.com, and more poetry from The Feedsack is here.
1. Buddhism Live: A Fibonacci Sequence
Five grandsons line up for treats youngest to oldest just opposite when their parents were with us in the Laos town Luang Prabang where monks queue up oldest to youngest every dawn for two thousand years to accept modest daily alms rounds meals community lay folk offer as each one extends his biksa bowl.
2. Haiku
Sunbeams glance moonbows dance waterfalls -- trees and ferns infinite fractals.
3. Marble Mountain Power Rangers
Last night’s last frost (pretty sure that’s what the full moon says), salmon half dead from their journey netted, we feast near a pre-fab towed from craigslist for parental comfort. Chocolate mousse is served outside the yurt. First light my boy and his wife tend to bok choy and endive, try out the drip irrigation. Post vegan omelettes and chores, my son and I prepare to dive deep on this stay’s final trip. Weaving up Elk Creek’s fork of the Klamath, madrones brighten our way through Doug Fir burn and bloom. A myrmecologist, E. introduces Happy Camp’s social insects. Down the road, a grandson’ll be here on his uncle’s ant farm to harvest such moments, unharness tribal overhangs. Arriving at a native stone and wood bloodied altar, a prophet gives me a kiss, washes my feet, smudges. Abruptly I’m 6’3” -- and even less likely an anthropologist. New Guinea warriors come alive from packed dirt carved out of serpentine rockface and cedar, spew thunder through helmets of Ponderosa pine. Penis guards piss in the wind sniffing incoming dragons. Broken driftwood old men bleached out washing in from the sea sun on molten boulders. Losing their vision, picked clean, they watch the river flow. A thistle medicine man shaped like a dwarf Christmas tree machetes a New World marbled lamb frozen in slabs of lava time sacrifice. Garnished in fern fossils, the threshold guardian’s enshrined top of amulets excavated from the tomb of a great king.
4. Spring Rites, Mendocino, circa 2008
Buzzy like flies, childhood buds together again this annual spring ritual fly up the coast under dappled canopies that shadow Big River’s crystalline beach past rusty scuppers stuck on conifered bluffs to the Pacific’s fogged-in edge. Bobtails unwarrened strut their stuff bound hutch to path as a grizzled sleek raven not yet spying jacks swoops from its gale-blown cypress ledge to peck her skylight ebony likeness then crap on Hranrad Hus (Old Norse for “whale’s road house”) where we three compose concertos in the ambergris key of Rx playing notes between the stillness this morning mid our blowsy Mendocino weekend. Friends and family abound, except for now when not around gone to town for dry goods and foodstuffs. Between winter and summer I swallow a host whole allow seeds tight in the bud to blossom and grow dream first-blooming trillium mid tangerine columbine keep day’s eyes open ‘til corollas close with the sun below Bolander pine dotted with huckleberry runners that envelop over-the-top cotton candy rhododendron whose pistils poke from pink panther petals where fleshy umbrellas thrive in primeval soil fertilizing fern canyons of my virginal soul. Forget-me-nots fill my brainlands. Condors stalk prey with great candor. Nothing bothers me today. Left to private devices stripped bare part coyote, part owl, part tipped over cow I fill a Martini tumbler with Pam’s trail mix ascend Duchamp’s twenty-two steps spiral to the catbird’s seat slip on a Carlos Nikai CD soar into the Captain’s chair overlooks all creation toward cosmic glimmer beyond picture windows blow the roof off, howl like newlyweds. Down below with the clocks so cold the ocean won’t shimmer irks a clerk in the mirror broke the spring of my firmament. I rise above where it is bright on both sides. Love, serve everyone. We are lonely unless banded together. Be at one with what is, be Grateful Dead. The end becomes a beginning. Happiness comes from within. May life be a feather.
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