This morning I stepped outdoors
and found earth firm, a solid back
I share with two elm trees, a dog,
some daisies, a flight of steps,
an empty pail, a stone too large to move,
a snake, a robin, two rabbits, angleworms,
a chain, lawn mower, doll dishes, a shoe
marked with puppy teeth, and grass.
I move sure of support on earth’s
broad shoulders where names, round as a
pebble, match with things, keep us aware
of our footprints in rocks, sand and
running streams.
The wedge of time splits us apart
from origins written in our blood,
left untranslated as we climb the path
to clouds of thought, to lose our way
in the mist of new vocabularies
as we try to read ghost words on signs
we took for directions. Spellbound
by what we say, we understand nothing
that shows us what we are and what
wind blows.
We look in a still pool and think we see
mountain and valley and plain as solid facts
until a pebble, a drop of water from a bird’s
beak, stirs the surface and makes the
picture blur. We build schools from bricks
of jargon, shape colleges from a fog of
words disguised as pain, love, loneliness,
disguised as truth.
I wade through sunshine to lean against a tree
owned by its citizenry of birds, watch buds
grace green stems, smell decay in old leaves.
I name the facts I live with one by one.
My dog knows this home where I was born,
learned love, where we will die, he knows
but does not speak to prove it, lets my tribe
turn hostile to meadows and clear streams,
tear out the guts of forests and pile up
slag heaps from mines and used car lots.
We vent our spleen with abstract nouns and
verbs—we kill the enemy, never an actual
man, orient our viewpoint, maximize security,
elevate the personnel, provide sanitary
facilities (my dog and a tree), endure
subjective compulsions, discover dynamic
forces, harmonize adjustments, identify
aggressions and sublimate our instincts.
I roll my thought around and wonder how
we lost our way in this dark abstract wood.
We hate our world with words and atomize
experience, boast nuclear fission as prestige,
yet the earth holds us, feeds us, cradles us
when we die, friendly and most beautiful.
I walk and scuff earth with my toe,
a small stone makes me lame, I empty
my shoe without one word to tell me how.
It may be our fate to die by language,
to become extinct and never understand
why we were doomed to disappear in space
where no rain falls, nor snow, nor flowers
bloom, nor bluejays call, nor young folk
mate, nor all the gusty days of our delight
will dawn again. Then who will know what Eden
we rejected, we the people rose too soon
in triumph of our tongue to live the day out
in the garden to live the day in, and
catastrophes will not be floods and
earthquakes but a spellbound emptiness,
concepts never furnished, never felt.
I watch a leaf fall as if there fell the
star I stand on into the mulch of time.
