David McAleavey

OREAD

1. At the beach, the day before

Through rock window, waves:
like watching washing machines,
foam from all angles.

*

Noise & wind & surf
rock altars tide pools a kite
a stranger's good dog.

2. The climb up

We leave one behind
for whom the hill is too steep;
she'll read book—brook—time.

*

Out of one valley
into a higher; redwoods
below, above us:

look from roots of these,
among ferns and wild iris,
down to tips of those.

3. Ridge view

From the loop, a loop
leading to edge, spectacle
blunt as blunt can be.

On an outcropping
near "End of Trail," we eat lunch;
coast north, sea, coast south.

4. Return

Caressing Big Sur redwoods'
scorched trunks, descending
the Ewoldsen Trail:

like paper, fibrous,
scaly where worn; expressing
core survival; scarred:

burned but still living;
not what we would imagine.
What we imagine.

LA PLUIE (THE RAIN)

Expecting rain, but after midnight,
at 10:30
we can't close the windows fast enough.

At 7, the gauge has a half inch.
Atomic clocks
don't bother with springs or metaphor;

used to be gears and ratchets made sense
by analogy
—the passing of time a mechanism—

but it's a continuum mostly,
interrupted
by insight or by the chapter's end

by the quantum loss of a half-life
or half a life.
I report: the weather's proceeding.

THE EOLIAN HARP

This March for the first time
half my neighbor's forsythia's bare
though a few more days
may restore it. No such doubt
about the present gusts, the coming rain,
the bike ride I'm planning nonetheless along the river
& my recollection even if I don't see it this time
of rough glitter through the trees,
sun, moving water. How I

think about the cosmos:
since the last postal rate hike
the Hubble stamps I admire
are out of date, and anyway their
miniature photographs false—
chromatic mediations
by NASA scientists—
but are there truer colors for galaxies
colliding ("Galaxy NGC 1316") or a nest
of galaxies birthing ("Eagle Nebula")?

Half the people on the streets
wear thudding Walkmen
or cradle phones at their ears, hoping
toward a simultaneity which is,
maybe, one way of getting phased-
in to a grand tranquility.

The news reports the universe
would look a greenish
turquoise, taken together,
could we only see it.
Tranquil
turquoise.

No,
now they say beige.

Working back against the headwind,
to synch with the whirring
universe's beat looks hard,

what beat there is, or we can hear—
though anything at all brings the mind
credit, the mind which really only a few
have ever thought responsible
for March.

David McAleavey is a professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at George Washington University. His latest book of poems is Holding Obsidian. Later this year Huge Haiku will be coming out from Chax Press in Tucson.

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