Horizon

Barry Lopez, 1945-2020

It was the very last Sunday of a dry

Southern California December, La Niña winter

like your childhood and mine.

The last hour of sundown held me in the cold garden.

Two voices rang out—amphibian poets

silent since March—and I understood:

all year they listen for the hum

of leaves that says rain, near future tense,

the curtain already falling long before we know it.

And listening, I’m released to head home

with the crows, to catch the dark news.

Barry Lopez died Christmas Day..

He was seventy-five.

~

Morning. Leaves shiver under drops—

rain, present tense, whole notes, slow as grieving.

I’ll remember this, I’ll compare

the rhythm of this late December rain

to patience. Your words held now

between the lips of silence.

All things are made by the wind. By water.

The boy you were and the man,

eye of water bird, dry branch, desert crystal—

light-music, masterpiece of polar ice—

numinous interiors real

as texture and color, as rock wolf cloud fire…

The anthropologist, Alan Walker, once said to you

with his hands on the smooth skull

of an australopithecine, Barry, I can’t prove this

but I believe we sang before we spoke.

30 years to write Horizon, your last book.

Afterward, you longed to travel

down enough to touch the gouged Pacific basin,

birth-scar where Moon broke out of Earth.

You quit that manuscript so many times,

came begging to the Mackenzie where beavers built

and re-built after storms and wildfire…

where a wand of alder, an ash stick,

nudged your hand—you got the message,

and kept on writing.

You always took the long way around.

~

Of time and human existence, you said

it needs to be redreamed.

At hospice, McKenzie twigs arrived on a current

of human hands—those who knew you, knew

alder, willow, ash, the beavers’ labor,

riverine refuge—your bed, surrounded

by friends, by trees who remember

rain and time before words,

time and rain, after.

Maía

Sources: Horizon, Arctic Dreams, Of Wolves and Men, and About This Life, Barry Lopez

NPR: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/26/948863127/barry-lopez-acclaimed-author-and-traveler-beyond-many-horizons-dies-at-75?fbclid=IwAR1qeOddJ3SWsLbmm10WapWPppFP94YbDpopDrrRHFwh7spryjwfDBIdqiE

Steve Trimble’s tribute and many others, posted on social media, December through January, 2020.

“Remembering Nature Writer, Barry Lopez” : from Terry Gross, Fresh Air, 1/8/21

Teaser photo credit: Photo by Jordan Wozniak on Unsplash