Poem: To Borrow from Gary

saw gary snyder last night at SMC. had gone to campus originally to help Luke with a paper for his second semester english class and to talk with Mary about making old style photography prints for a new book of hers. Gary was just a bonous. He read a bit from his new book and from collected notes from at home. The below is a reaction to his first poem about his climb of Mt St Helens and Hiroshima.

2006.03.22-23
To Borrow From Gary (Snyder)
In 45 Gary had the U235 bomb and St. Helens
All at once.
One had bloomed
And on still a bud of earth for climbing.
I lay no such claims of coincidental
Time for both these moments.
Being at a moment in time where
Both are cognizant in the human mind shall suffice.
that and St. Helens was part of my
1st birthday-eve party in K-falls, Oregon.
Dusty sky, rumbling earth and enduring silence
It is not so much
volcano as psychic vision of the a-bomb
or
a-bomb as psychic vision of volcanoes
that interest me.
No. change is always.
finding new dictions and word covers
in our language.
Call it destruction, call it horrific, call it birth.
I chanced to live in eye sight of Helens
And to walk 500 meters beneth the hypocenter along the motoyasu-gawa.
And the vibrancy of life!
Ash heavy Douglas fir skeletons bloom.
With fungus, pearly-everlastings, lupines and other nitrogen fixers.
The iron skeleton of the Industrial Promotion Hall
Blooms a skirt of rhododendrons every spring.
With greens that pierce the pink of the flowers.
When the sakura was said to never return again.
It did.
What a spring this must have been.
Burnt black trees with buds of life and hope.
The hope of a people tied so intricately in
The delicacy and resiliency of the earth.
Blossoms must fall for them to return again in the next moment.
But Helens
Her birth was different still, as is every birth.
It was not the old in new molt.
No. Metamorphosis. almost complete.
Spirit lake bloomed with new eye invisible life.
Feasting on the fodder of matchstick trees.
Never to freeze again because of their frenzy.
An old man who would not leave the
Lake was consciously swallowed into the-
sky above that swallowed
Thousands that morning at 8:15
Just after the detection devices had been dropped.
And the children lined up outside.
Fuji-san and Hood-san blink
at each other from across
the sea.

A-bomb dome's floral skirt