I. Hieroglyphic Dust in the Air
A barn collapses and fills again with wind
and light over the little ant. It’s like breathing,
the scarab beetle scrambling along an edge.
And God must be riding a horse made of wild energy.
And that horse probably eats grass out there
at the far reaches behind the black mask of the rainstorm,
where the trees made from bones are still standing
and the mushroom rings and celery tastes.
“Wake up, little brothers,” the moon says to its oceans.
Isn’t it like that, centering of sun in space of each atom,
in space of the spiraling, saucering galaxy
much larger than the Milky Way, with dragonflies
that pulse with stars for their bodily atoms
flying the first creation this is?
II. Walking Beneath Cottonwoods in Early Spring
Hours before leaves begin, we walk beneath old cottonwoods
at night, a few scattered stars letting us be here,
the trees holding as roots of the air, in the split second
of eternity, for what do we know that isn’t before
speaking? Is it all a tree’s body, the space waiting,
the light passing up from roots and shade-falling
part of an ancient building through people’s arms
in the day? In a house nearby, a girl is sleeping.
When she becomes thirty, she will know
how to move, unlike any other, in her way,
in her sense. Things won’t be easy.
She’ll need to be stronger than anyone she knows.
The roots of the air are ready to break into leaves.
But why would God’s horse be thirsty and hungry?
You could say both God and the horse would be
hungry because all the blinding blue
blazes yellow-gold suns so white and empty.
The cottonwoods are doing it, in waves of light
from the earth and from space, as someone you love
talks and moves closer to you, and as you
talk, you want to tell her.
III. Afternoon Lit by Breakers
This afternoon lifts and releases the day,
igniting open sky over the ocean.
It breaks in waves
on the surface of bean leaves.
Old cottonwoods press powerfully
through root roads, using the gravity
of starlit snowfall through atomic core
centered in the planet’s heat.
In the churning and heaving,
what might have fallen years before quiet,
giving to what this is, propelling cool
downswing and then lifting, certain
old doors are pushed slowly as we work.
And harmonics of wood and crickets
live in the hollows
that house what is said.
IV. Morning Sun
Blossoms burst through their shells in the sky,
from inside the vertical sway of branches,
the midnight emerald of leaves if you start trying
to hope into the sun the next morning,
if you start into the sun for which cells
of your body are lakes and you are the fish,
the efforts lost, sphered, a coast of breath lifting
in the spine, sun in each molecule, the debris
of faults, and the morning sun rising.
Wind from morning sun opened the road.
Bhagawan Das sang in his muddy locks
by the ocean spinally crashing waves
of his instrument, reaching over the dust
path that stopped and began in long sway
when breath was atonal stellar sky
behind what would go on.