Winter days after snowfall
suited up with boots, coat & gloves
I walk outside & start shoveling the blank
slate of what’s fallen
As far as I can scan
the landscape’s gone utterly
alabaster. Silenced. Once again
untouched by human hand
I dig in & dare a new start re-
designing the yard of my chosen place
Slide & scoop. Lift & pile.
Slide & scoop
I clear the driveway
Make paths kitchen to compost
Linking house to studio
Pushing home field to highway fence
As a youngster I built driftwood forts
on California beaches
An ephemeral architecture of patch
& lean, chance & scheme
Pressing washed-up castoffs
& makeshift debris into artful sculptures of
the Found
Working at playing in the sand
As a hippie Rainbow inspired by Gary Snyder
Peter Berg • Dolores LaChapelle • Lew Welch
Dave Foreman • Judy Bari & all my
Earth First! eco-buddies & warrior poets
I spent ten years sabotaging
the mindset of those who chose not
to build harmoniously with
the living Earth
Those who would rather turn
the tools against us, destroying
the delicate balance of this blue planet
Our game was to sway public opinion
Not endangering Flora, Fauna, Funga
Just the clever crippling of machinery
Making of its marring an Example
Reacting to injury in symbolic reciprocity
Doing harm not to humans
but to the balance sheets of
Wall St. corporations. Stopping
the bulldozers of deconstruction
Entangling our bodies to the shell
of America’s runaway wealth engine
with its foot on the pedal
pressed hard to the floor
Maybe some of my relations in the
family of monkeys I call Humus ludens
(hardly Homo sapiens) will form
a Ministry of the Future
& track a way back from
the climate precipice. The hurricane of
overshoot. Nuclear’s black swans
And our political denouement of despair
Now as a Colorado elder it’s less
about outcome & more about practice
Yes, thinking globally
but acting locally
from these small lawns of hope
Our wee fields of rural refuge
Smoothing a way forward. Crafting
a neural playground of kinship
Re-creating the beauty
of the hand-made
on the soft, wild palette
of the utterly natural
