Montana Seeds

For Eugene

Gone, I was the bristle in the brittle pines
looped fractaling along the highway bends.
Mine were raw quills, of goose and porcupine;
mine the rock brains; mine the hands

that slapped wet prints upon the breaching stones;
a tremulous, confessing risk of joy;
the silver in the sockets of my bones;
the sun-bridge on the little wrestling bay.

I grew from roots of efficacious dreams.
I learned my name when others lost their own.
The precious glints all settled in my streams,
most beloved when they were most unknown.

And in my stems, I trembled with the Christ,
whose edges warbled me, by trunks, by resined cones
shelved and seedy with a hundred dormant lives
each, if undying, doomed to stay alone.

Because there is a life that does not live.
There is a death I know that does not die.
Hid down the streamy bends, with tipple and with give;
brustling toward the pollens of our brittle pines.