selected poems by Ernest Lowe from the eighties
My search for awareness and my poetry moved back into the larger world in the eighties. Reagan was elected and re-elected and poured our wealth into even more nuclear weapons and Star Wars.
I went through a period of learning deeply about the many ways we had damaged our home and each other while I had been "working on myself". At times I felt as though I were on fire as I tried to reconcile my spiritual vision with this world of greed and cruelty.
I feel that writing poetry is my way of remaining sane as I pay attention to the evils of our human nature. Equally, my poems are my way of affirming that we have a deeper nature where we know how to act with creative love.
I thank my family around the planet –
the many people whose actions so often reflect this deeper human nature.
Corky 1963-1980
i
Last summer you could still
hike up Coal Creek with me.
I lifted you over the big logs
when you couldn’t make it.
Now I’m here and you’re back home,
just able to lumber outside to piss.
Your thick coat hides the high ridge
of your backbone, so stiff
you take a whole minute to sit down.
Cancer’s eating most of your food.
Sunday night a teenage couple
crashed through the high school gym,
one hundred miles an hour.
He's dead. She's broken.
Pain? Hopelessness? Futility?
I talked about them all week,
them and you and Martha's
nuclear nightmares.
I even imagined
swimming out into the lake
exhaling air . . . . inhaling water
. . . .
and . . . . . . . . stillness.
You're the first life that mattered
to be included, complete, within mine.
And you've included within yours
all the years of my awakening.
You've led encounter groups,
guided acid trips,
licked my hand in meditation.
Time after time you showed me
how to open my heart.
Now you teach me to love
even the decaying days –
the weakening . . . . the fading . .
. .
vomit on the rug.
I remember running with you
along the high bluffs at Salt Point,
Earth juicy with spring,
even thistles soft under foot.
Led by you, so full of life,
I didn't even notice
the danger of the edge.
All the time of your life
I've been trying to accept death.
Looked for death in the mirror . . .
.
saw an Aztec skull with bands of turquoise.
Looked again . . . saw nothing there.
Envisioned my friends sitting around
my death bed, laughing, singing.
Yet I still panic at the feeling of
roots
twisting into this body breathing dirt.
ii
I wake up to hear you vomiting
by the bedroom door, rush you out
into the drizzle, watch with pained
love
as you stagger about, trying to shit.
you can't even lift the plume of your
tail.
I knelt by you the other night,
you so peaceful, as I cut the shitty
hairs out.
Last Sunday morning geologist Dave Johnson
was five miles from St. Helen's summit.
"Vancouver! Vancouver!
This is it!!
"Vancouver! Vancouver!"
The Times says,
"It was an exultant call. He undoubtedly
was fascinated by the sight,
his mind racing to note details."
For a student of life ticking by
in thousands of centuries,
what a gift, to die in this moment,
one with Earth's sudden passion.
But the Times also tells me
St. Helen's eruption
was a blast measured in megatons,
hundreds of square miles of forest
dead in an instant,
fall out ash drifting across the country,
a plastic coffee can lid found
with impression of a human hand
burnt into it, no sign of man or coffee
can.
Am I to love this dread potential
even as I love you?
Can love be so enormous?
iii
I walk our accustomed route,
taking you along in my mind,
sniffing the earthy smells
I know you'd like.
There are raindrops on irises
and green-backed swallows, hundreds,
darting through the air.
Two fly over the lake
zigzagging along
the same complex path
in perfect synchrony,
life tuned to life.
I have to breathe deep to include
their pulsing flight,
memories of running with you
along the high bluffs
and my nuclear visions,
projected on St. Helens.
Back home I see the life
the life still in you,
the life along with the dying.
And I listen to hear
what you have to say to me:
"Here, friend, me/you
breathing in and out,
seeing . . . . feeling no fear,
no pain. Feeling energy/power/love.
Tasting water you bring me
when I can no longer lift my head.
Now . . . . Now . . . . Now . . .
."
iv
To come back from the ocean
and find you dead . . . . still . .
. .
absolutely still
like the stillness I saw this morning
in the Indian woman who tells
her Stilaquamish people
they are love itself.
Full moon night we bury you
with irises . . . . Martha's baby tooth
. . . .
forget-me-nots . . . . smoked fish .
. . .
Grace's earring . . . . a rubber ball
. . . .
a clay serving girl to open cans of
dogfood.
We hold a proper wake,
drinking Murphy's Irish Whiskey,
calling the library for a shaggy dog
story
and loving the stillness as well as
the dancing.
Thank you, friend.
Thank you, son.
Thank you, teacher.
Thank you, death.
Thank you, life.
Thank you, Lord.
1980
Burning the Mother
i
4 A.M. Smell of grass smoke
in the hot night air.
To the southeast
an orange halo
over the hills.
I phone the dispatcher.
"You know there's
another fire
near Reservation Road?"
"You mean beside
the one
we been fighting all night?"
"Where is it?
We own land over there."
"South side
of Oat Mountain
on the reservation,
down to Chimney Road."
Back in Seattle Vicky tried to teach
me,
no one owns the Mother.
We're only guests here.
She was trying to help an Indian mother
learn to stop
burning
her son with a cigarette.
I speed out Success Valley Drive
to Reservation Road.
At top of the hill I see
orange necklaces
all around Oat Mountain.
Procession of bobbing headlamps,
firefighters going
up canyon,
white lights moving through
Earthbrown
orange air.
Aunt Clara sits in an idling pickup,
scolding forestry
men:
"You let it burn one hundred acres of ours
it didn't have to.
I've seen a bunch of farmers
with wet gunny sacks and mops
do a better job than that."
Forestry men politely explain
theories of scientific firefighting,
while the fire line stretches
from Res Road
all the way to McDermont's house,
to the top of the canyon.
They shuffle feet,
"Well, we got the cattle out at least."
A pickup with Indians
turns into Chimney Road.
"No use going up there.
Your house burnt down."
(Firefighter's joke.)
I'm choking on the bitter smell.
Earth on fire.
KMJ this morning
says, young Indian
with
holy name
arrested.
Fire was set eight different places.
A thousand acres burned,
mostly on reservation.
Nine fires there this Summer.
Both sides of Oat Mountain
are black now.
ii
I phone the poem to Vicky.
Soft honey-golden
voice
silent.
Then,
"You don't say why it happens."
The Recorder, A Freedom Newspaper,
tries to find
out why:
"Desperate for a solution,
Chief Alec Garfield said,
reasons are probably multiple
64 per cent unemployment
Unemployed are down in the dumps
and distressed.
'Anything is better than doing
nothing.'
"The incident commander, said,
'One problem is
everybody is related.
An Indian who reports
an arsonist
reports a relative.'"
Vicky said,
"I went over to a reservation
near Yakima
and found eight of my friends
had been killed
in one-car accidents."
iii
Why?
Whitemen fought a war
against the Indians.
Indians lost.
(300,000 in California
when Spaniards came.
15,000 left by 1910.)
Now
Indians turn
whiteman's war
against themselves
and the
Mother burns.
August, 1982
I bombed Libya tonight
I bombed Libya tonight.
(Also killed a guy who killed
a guy,
him screaming and kicking
as I
strapped him into
my electric chair.)
Dropped my one ton
laser-guided bombs
in surgical strikes
on terrorist
command and control centers,
training camps,
and babies.
I bombed Libya tonight.
I laid all night
in my crap,
hoping
someone
would come home and clean me
up.
Then, stinking
in the dawn's light
I remembered I'm all alone here,
an old guy
just able
to stagger around the halls.
Threw the sheets in the garbage,
sprayed my bed with lysol,
took a shower
(no hot water)
and felt bad
I don't have the
guts
to just die.
I bombed Libya tonight.
The light was soft and warm,
Sun coming in under the clouds,
and these little
yellow and black birds --
Warblers, Don said --
were jumping
around
in the bottle brush bush.
A hummingbird hovered,
sucking nectar from the red flowers.
Then, a Great Blue Heron flew over,
real slow,
while I planted sweet corn.
I bombed Libya tonight.
Drove my paper mill
a little further up the Amazon today.
Everybody's so amazed
how big it is,
how easy it turns
Rain Forests
into enough paper
to bear all the news
that's fit to print.
I bombed Libya tonight.
I'm sleeping under
the bridge in your town
on nights the cops
are too doped
up to drive me away.
Got muddy after the last rain,
but I don't mind much
about creature comforts.
You're fuckin' lucky I hate me
more than you.
I bombed Libya tonight.
Mariposa Lilies are blooming
along the road to the Reservation.
Reminds me about this mean Indian
up on the Klammath River --
cursed out my wife,
rammed my boat.
So I hit him over the head
with his oar,
stomped
on his arm and broke it,
threw him in the river.
He like to drown,
everybody standin'
around laughing,
they were so sick of his shit.
I bombed Libya tonight.
There are white flowers and bees
all over the
berry vines.
Soon I'll be making
raspberry jam
on what used to be
my Mom's stove,
probably listening to Cotton Club
Ellington
or Bird's
live sessions,
dancing around as I stir
the bubbling red pot,
and wondering why
I bombed Libya tonight.
Ernest Lowe
April 14, 1986
Ed Setchko
Ed was a wonder to me way back in the
Sixties,
a minister who was a psychologist who
understood
the world is one whole web of being,
right there on a bench under the campanile
at U.C.,
sharing a lunch I'd made for us.
Then he got instructions he couldn't
understand --
go visit the death camps.
He went to Dachau and Bergen-Belsen
that Summer.
Had all the appropriate responses and
went home.
Next year, Ed had the urge to go again.
At Auschwitz he went out of his mind,
psychotic for an hour, screaming, raging,
pounding on the earth.
Didn't remember a thing when he "came
to his senses."
Back home Dick Korn said, you can't just
forget about that.
He and his students set up a death camp
for three days.
Ed played every role -- commandant,
executioner, turncoat,
whore, prisoner courageous and prisoner
whimpering.
He learned in his own heart who created
The Holocaust.
Then he quietly set out to do what one
man can do to heal a horror.
Ed worked with the survivors and the
children of survivors,
with Nazis and the children of Nazis,
with ministers and the teachers of ministers,
with rabbis and the most blessed of
rabbis.
He never claimed any achievement,
yet his eyes grew clearer, year by year.
Then, at breakfast one morning, he said
he had new instructions --
"Quit teaching at the seminary and
take my ministry to peacemakers in Israel.
If anything might trigger nuclear
war, it's the Middle East.
Do what I can to loosen the fingers
on that trigger."
After each trip he would tell me with
awe
of the Saints he had met, of the Saints
he had succored.
An Israeli who opened a halfway house
for Arabs and Jews,
recognizing unity despite the prison
of the past.
A Palestinian mother who saw her children
crippled
by a random burst from an Israeli soldier's
Ouzi.
She became a peacemaker, transformed
into love.
A national hero who ran the the British
blockade with Holocaust refugees,
then dared to speak for the rights of
Palestinian refugees in this new land.
The morning after the massacre at Shatila
Ed and I sat in the Berkeley sun,
mourning this echo of The Holocaust,
trying to understand how the echos could
ever end.
One night, in a gathering discussing
our need for new images of heroism,
I described Ed as one of the few heroes
I knew.
He was mortified to be so described.
"After all, I do so little when so
much is needed."
June 1986
a heart shaped leaf
A yellow grape leaf,
mottled with burnt orange,
and a tinge
of green,
is pressed against a boulder
by a thin sheet of the Tule River,
the river's surface etched
by lines of
light.
The edge of the leaf,
lifted by a twig,
throws a brilliant line of water
an inch into the air.
Droplets running down the twig,
luminous streaks
of life.
Elephant-sized boulders
above me here
were smoothed and tossed
by this same stream.
Praise be for the ocean and the clouds
for the snow banks melting
and this rushing
river
holding a heart-shaped leaf
against a rock.
Aug 13, 1986
For Grace
Singing Kyrie Eleison
Christe Eleison,
tuned to the roar of the Tule
River,
I see a grey Water Ouzel
bobbing and wading
into the rushing stream.
Little torrents of water
billow over him
as he ducks his head to feed.
Kyrie!
Christe!
A blue dragon fly
glides low
over the dancing river.
Eleison!
August 13, 1986
Yaudanchi Time
There's a reservation beyond Oat Mountain.
Yaudanchi Indians, some of them my cousins,
live there,
there where my ancestors drove them
back from the good bottom land.
All my childhood they were just "drunken
Indians,"
no one even knew their name.
"Diggers," my Grandma called them,
because they were so "dumb" they didn't
even grow food.
(Coyote had showed them our Mother's
land is so rich
they could just gather its seeds and
roots!
But my ancestors had missed the Gold
Rush,
thought this valley they called Success
was a poor consolation prize.)
Reminds me of that Third World out there
(some say there's a Fourth World too,
even poorer.)
Full of natives. Getting restless.
Brown people too "dumb" to learn
the lessons of success grey people teach.
Sue and J.R. up on the reservation are
learning the old spirit ways.
Sweat lodge every Friday night.
Collecting sage in the holy way.
Remembering the Mother and the Father.
But still, Indian kids burn their own
hills
just to watch the fires they dare not
speak.
Dusk in Success Valley now.
Gato Madre sits on the fence by the
orchard,
thinking black cat thoughts.
Calico Nadia drinks from the dogs' dish.
I sit here feeling roots in a place
where my family's been so briefly --
one hundred and thirty years --
just a wink of Yaudanchi time.
1987
Martha Lowe
I hadn't wanted to bring children into
this world
but you had the courage to be born anyway,
fourteen years into the nuclear age.
And you amazed me looking out at this
craziness
with such absolute clarity of love.
You were my first spiritual teacher.
I'd look into your eyes to learn who
I am,
to forget all the mistakes
I thought I had to keep on repeating.
Then, of course, you learned my mistakes
while I struggled to drop them,
while I struggled to make this a world
you could inhabit with greater ease
than I.
You became a fan of disasters, earthquakes,
volcanos,
not strange for the daughter of a father
incessantly speaking of strontium-90,
100 megaton blasts.
As a young woman your dreams became
nuclear nightmares,
the world you love so deeply, exploding,
burning.
But you also set about studying the
hero's journey,
all those stories revealing the circling
pathways of truth.
I see you, tiny child, feeding huge
horses wildflowers.
I remember you, powerful child, fasting
for a day
rather than eat my goddamned broccoli.
I treasure you, tender woman, rolling
back the night.
1987
Jeremiah
upon looking into the morning's mail and the past night's tv screen
A packet from Stafford in the mailbox
this morning,
green grass sprouting through brown
on the hill behind the row of boxes.
The Monitor suggests our early rains
this Fall are due to El Nino,
as is the Northwest drought so severe
the salmon can hardly swim upstream.
Stafford sends news of the Center for
the Advancement of Human Cooperation,
and his speech to the World Organization
on General Systems and Cybernetics --
Holism and the Frou-frou slander,
a description of a series of paintings
he is starting – Requiem --
and a photo of his new self-portrait
-- a Jeremiah looking out with rage
at a world in which God's back appears
to have been broken.
I need only flip through the mail to find that world.
In the New Yorker a Wall Street clerk
on the first black Monday says,
"Tokyo starts in four hours. I hope
they crash and burn, like we did."
The Monitor headlines, "US and Europe
play at financial chicken
as dollar plunges."
The Monitor also reports on a new inland
sea in Argentina
covering nearly ten percent of the country's
cropland,
created by engineers and bureaucrats
who failed to look ahead,
even when their aides told them of dryland
places
named Pehuajo and Tenque Lauquen,
deep lake and round lagoon.
Back in the New Yorker, Jacobo Timerman
(himself a prisoner in the days of the
Argentine Generals)
reports on the perversity of torture
in Pinochet ‘s Chile
between ads for grand hotels, cruise
ships, and fine jewelers.
Sixty Minutes last night carried videos
of torture more subtly perverse.
The polygraph expert stroked the hair
of his young suspect,
crooning helpfulness, as
he raped her breaking mind,
lying about the case, feeding back her
fragmentary impressions,
prompting a false confession to hiring
the bat swinging murderers of her lover.
The detective holds her hand.
Lord, Jeremiah's cries have not gone
out of date.
Last week's Sixty Minutes brought further
evidence --
Just before the story on the murder
of a presidential candidate in Haiti
I learn that Northrup Aviation is in
court, charged with fraud
(what an understatement)
in the manufacture and testing of guidance
systems for MX missiles.
A Northrup whistle blower says, if fired,
they're as likely
to hit Chicago as Moscow.
A management investigation lasted one
day and was killed.
A company executive says, "Everybody
makes mistakes".
Didn't cybernetics get invented as a
by-product
of designing guidance systems for weapons
in that last good war?
Yet Stafford is accused of raising frou-frou
dust
when he notes we've failed to apply
ourselves to designing
guidance systems for sane life on this
lovely Planet.
He says, " . . . the world already
grows enough food
to feed the entire population of
the earth . . .
and 40,000 children a day starve
to death."
Describing his cycle of paintings, he
says,
"So the Requiem will never be shown?
Who cares?! I am through with
compromises.
They have dogged my life in management
:
there is no half-way tache
of a paintbrush."
On the hill behind my mail box, green
grass sprouts through the brown.
But the salmon in the Northwest find
it difficult to swim upstream.
November 9, 1987
A few days later, a small ray of light:
People are carrying the salmon upstream!
Jane Byrd
Before she started to speak I wrote,
with puzzlement,
"The lesson of the Holocaust --
that humanity can rise as high
as we have descended."
Jane then explained:
"Learning from the Holocaust has
to do
with freeing myself from Auschwitz
as something inevitable,
as the final evidence of what human
beings are."
(Jane was born in 1949 yet regards --
and remembers --
life in the camps as her own personal
experience,
as do some others of her generation.)
"By looking at it as a human possibility
that was fulfilled
I see it need not be our destiny.
We gain the freedom to not repeat
it
once we acknowledge that we humans
created it.
There is only responsibility."
"The greatest horror isn't the actual
deaths
but the fact that human beings
could so tear the fabric of life,
destroying even the faith in our
humanity.
Of course we trust atomic weapons
to defend us
if we believe this is all we are.
"My friend and Auschwitz survivor
could say,
'I know how high humanity
can rise.
I saw their ashes floating
upward.'
"Yet this man forgave the Germans,
Saw what happened was human, not
only German.
Today he inspires love between Arabs
and Jews.
He rose above the ashes of his family.
And he isn't the only one, this Ka-tzetnik
135633."
After she stopped speaking, I began
to understand,
"The lesson of the Holocaust --
that humanity can rise
at least as high
as we have descended."
1987
Free flying now
Down, down,
down
poison oak slopes
down to a wooded canyon,
down to recollect the whole
in a ferny grove of redwoods,
settling at last in a ring of trees
where
once one giant stood.
Like the students from China last night,
my eyes are
dry,
reflecting a dry stream bed.
I went to a 'show to support Beijing
students.'
In the
lobby banks of tv sets played and replayed
scenes of that morning's massacre --
medics carrying bloody youth across fields of flames
a jumble of bodies as only
death can pose them
soldiers tearing down the Goddess of Democracy
a lone student standing against a line of armed soldiers.
The students before the tvs watched
and watched,
eyes dry,
faces blank with shock.
Down I come to recollect the whole.
I thought I'd learned that hope is folly
even as is despair.
But students in Tiananmen Square set
me hoping,
gave me homeland in their thirst for freedom.
And now I lean against
this redwood
trying to remember that clear space
between hope and despair.
The show went on last night
in a hall hung
with banners --
stop the killing
remember the martyrs.
I thought art would give way to fiery
speeches
but no, a chorus
sang, then a baritone, a soprano.
Liu Xin
said, "Tiananmen Square is bleeding
and my heart is bleeding.
I will sing, 'Under the iron wheel'"
Liu Qiong-Jun danced
the dance
of long
sleeves
cerise sleeves
flowing and rippling free,
filling the air
with ancient
patterns.
A student rushed to the mike to report
a call from home:
"It's even
worse than tv says.
People stick their heads out the window
and the soldiers shoot them.
Tanks are crushing students.
It's worse than the Japanese.
Down with the
old men
who fill the streets of Beijing with Chinese blood."
My head ached -- so much rage reserved.
My throat ached -- so many screams held silent.
Then Wu Yu Kiang, holding his bamboo
flute, said,
"All day
I have been weeping.
I watch my people being killed.
I don't see we can have freedom soon.
So all I can do is play a song
that talks about freedom and liberty."
And he played a lilting
song of birds,
birds calling in the air,
free flying now,
shrill and piercing.
The stream bed below me
is an S curve
like Liu Qiong-Jun's long sleeves
free in the air above her.
The fresh green of new redwood
shoots
springs from the tree at my back.
Owls and towhees call free in
the air above
and I recollect
the whole
here in Tiananmen Grove.
Ernie Lowe
June 4, 1989
Control
"Cybernetics is the science of communication
and control in animals and machines."
-- Norbert
Weiner
Control in the thesaurus jangles this
sixties psyche
like a prison gate slamming shut.
As a verb its companions include
browbeat ... restrict ... subjugate ... bully.
As a noun --
dominance ... oppression ... tyranny ... whiphand!
Control -- is it something I define myself
as lacking
if I don't take it?
Or is it a continually flowing action
of my being,
self -- undivided?
I'm afraid. I hesitate, frozen.
Even if I do the right thing I'll do it wrong.
I breathe my fear, taste it, caress
it
until I move with that special grace
only my fear can give me.
Control -- is it something you take over
me
or that I gain over you?
Or is it a continually flowing quality
of our being,
self -- undivided?
I want sex but say let's make love.
You're dog tired but say I don't feel in the mood.
A sword down the middle of the bed
until you giggle at my unscrewed tight face
and we laugh ourselves to sleep
in each other's freedom giving
arms.
Control -- is it something we take over
our world
to save it from our savage attempts to control it?
Or is it a continually flowing way of
being,
being in this world,
self -- undivided.
I painfully puzzle whole systems that
are killing us,
positive feedback loops outrageously linking
my friend being called a coke whore --
I've known her all her life --
to Peruvean coca farmers slashing and burning their forests
to poor Southern
countries filling the banks of the North.
I plant a tree -- a blue spruce --
and another -- a dawn redwood --
and another
. . .
And I remember Ed --
who twenty years ago told me of cybernetics,
that science of communication and control.
Ed has planted two trees
for every year of his life.
He is now planting a third tree
for every year of
his life.
He and I will go on planting trees
all the years of our lives.
September 26, 1989