i.
Full-fresh
morning stretcht
like ruby veins in
a heliotrope back
towards night’s gasping
fragments. The fleeing thing
foundling in dews chill, pill bugs,
earthworms puddle-muddle, beetles
all kinds shake
free the restless rhythms of the
evening.
In the skylark’s swoop there is a species of serenity.
The first, twisting feather fall that
grasps at earth’s edges (where the world
touches is activity, even at the piercing of keratin
into chitin). She snatches at the little world
(forests the
scale of dreams), beak, wing,
and talon making ruinous waves before
the return
of stillness.
ii.
Quartz-cloud with a sparkle
like gypsum, one can hear
the creak of the earth if you
attune yourself through touch
(all sense is touch, after all,
the world strikes your tympanum,
tastebuds, light lifts your
eyes—all world is glory, glory).
Two young men find their footing
in loose dirt—the goatherd’s path,
steep and stiff up the old crag.
Do you think it’ll rain—we’ll
feel it first, then the first
takes out a single, ponderous globe
red-orange in the hand and he feels it,
tests its weight. Heavy as the dawn
and flush with nature’s secret—sweetness.
Arms outstretched to his fellow
he offers this sustenance and they
split it piece and segment, each
to each and on the rock ledges
rest their bulk in repose—
Eyes outward, they see the expanse
and activity of the world below
(every day new-sung, what life!)
and observe all that is made beat
in harmony. Roadways wind as a spider’s web
or veins pocked by cells flowing far
away carrying, carrying. Cities
square, rectilinear, right—give way
to the heave and sprawl of suburbia,
crystals newgrown with unpatterned
regularity and burst forth bud-like,
all latticechaos and peoplepatterned
Their edges soften, waves in ebb that give
way to the fish’s scales and the
tendrils of kelp and the rot of ages—
all of these are their own edges, bleeding
into the next. In our guts lies civilization,
the pith of a mandarin is its own
web—the bitter before the bite.
All this is in them then—
iii.
Nature knows no coincidence
but speaks forward mutual purpose
in difference. The moonglow a szyzgy
for the eyeshine of nocturnal
creatures, each with its own way of
lighting the darkling world. We
find the secret ways in the
dark—some through dreams
that float across coal-black heaven
and find a home in flecks of
carbonate stardust. Some in the creep of the earth—
pawpads gentle on the soft talc of forest,
dirt, dust, all in threnody.
What song is in this? The breeze rustling the tall grass—
The two men
who sit and stare, bond in mutual stillness,
listening to the silence that is there
for those who have learned to hear.
