II.
Hot water pushed quartz and gold
in solution through magma to surface
as sunbeams and as wedding rings.
Reconceiving bodies, we call them “veins.”
(We write in a ‘a similar vein.’)
Shirley, a doctor’s wife traveling to
California in 1851, writes of her
“geological deficiencies” and delights in “everchanging
surfaces” when she’s just arrived at
the new camp called Rich Bar.
Men are filling pans with dirt;
“I gather from their remarks that
these bars are formed by deposits
of earth crowding the river aside
occupying a portion of its bed.”
A solution to an individual is reading more.
Of course there was no mother
lode; of course it was unlikely.
103III.
Recovering from an individual as one reads,
eyes too busy to go backward.
Shirley, who hasn’t made it far
into history, writes to her sister
in a lively, modest style imitating
Bret Harte’s literariness, of the death
of Mrs. B., a miner’s wife.
Reading at night (if you’re tired):
like a pickaxe, the eye falls
on each word. It makes holes
in a territory. (Some were amazed
when some others at the conference
claimed their stylistic territory.) From inside
the claim, a mineral-self leaks out.
--The text of a woman’s body
--The body supported by two buttertubs
--The woman’s coffin of unstained pine
--Unstained pine lined with white cambric
Little Mrs. B., unimpressed by exterior
dramas and wreaths of thoughtful snowflakes.
A dead woman, as when we
lie down to read at night,
to read among those who’ve lived.
From Cascadia, Wesleyan University Press, 2001 pp.36-
37