Yosemite

Yosemite, published in 1988, is a collection of short poems written on a trip to the park in December of 1987. It has nine sections, with 64 haiku, senryu, fragments, impressions, and other short poems, plus a concluding slightly longer poem, arranged as follows:

• • arriving (four poems)

  • bridalveil falls (three poems)

  • the valley (eight poems)

  • the ahwahnee (five poems)

  • curry village (three poems)

  • wawona (fourteen poems)

  • tuolumne grove (twelve poems)

  • wawona (again) (fifteen poems)

  • the valley (last look) (one slightly longer poem)

The following are some sample poems from Yosemite.

driving north

pressing my finger

to the glass

pancake clouds

flipping by

the stars stay the same

still stream

reflecting—

I rape it with a stone

     . . . repent

still falls the rain

winter moonlight

sheds her shadow

in the trees

Postscript

In August of 2022, I came across the old notebook where I had first written these poems. I had marked the location, day, and in some cases even the time of day when I wrote these poems. For example, I jotted down the first poem, “driving north,” at 8:35 p.m. on 3 December 1987 in or near Bakersfield, California (driving from Riverside in Southern California north to Yosemite). In later notebooks I’ve continued to record the date and location of each poem, but no longer the time. The notebook with these Yosemite poems is the second oldest of my poetry notebooks I am still able to find, but I also have at least one other notebook’s contents surrounding the time of the Yosemite poems. I no longer remember if I truly considered these poems to be haiku (many are a far cry from it), or if I didn’t care what they were, but I do remember deliberately writing them (in a fresh new notebook) as a conscientious way to poetically record what I believe was my first visit to Yosemite National Park.

—6 August 2022