We’d come far,
as half-moon rose
between branches aspens held above
what we know. We had reached

the crystal call of nuthatches,
web-splitting winds
retiring mistakes,

orange-scented rooms
of an inner house, the outer space
labs wheeling over troubles,
as if eleven Tibetan lamas
had conjured speeds we need

to heal
what has been wounded
in the Orphic wail.

We had walked what we love
not far from furnaces
of intense success
people near us built against sheer loss.

**

The paper we were written on
was light reaching the planet.

Working, resting,
all returned to soul.

When breaking open syntax,
we heard what held us down
to grounding: central sun
that drew these atoms
into living light.

What happened when we could not be ourselves
hounded the people
we had worked to be,
the way a call dies back into gardens,

future children sleeping in gusts,
nothing having been here before
in 2001 of time expanding
its turquoise and yttrium,
its electro-osmotic evening fog
by new apples, gingers
that root back by birthing,

after Pacific nighttime sky
ignited a few ancient signs
that found us here
in vast silence.

Barbells clang from the neighbor’s garage.
And the wind sounds
as if someone is letting air out
from inside the trees. They look like it,
tired, losing their yellowed maps.

No, those are old letters from overseas forces
blowing across the lawns,
some from those whose listening
is now sumac, whose living wages is our life,

and we are not just folks
here walking around entirely,
definitely not these legs and arms
and nails on fingers only, or hair
in the wind or beards scattered on the body.

Definitely not just this brain
the skeleton carefully carries
like a serving person lifting a meal
up the stairs to the Indonesian throne.

Now afternoon glows from walls
as the brain cools into ancient cave
paintings. No, into figures only calculus
could cast into long-ranged functions.

But we are out listening to the birds
beneath our lives, working on further
into the fall, asking for simple understanding,
for Calvinist forgiveness,
yes, of course, and for regard,
the kind that heals
from inside birth

that brought us to this planet.

Immense dawn lifts again the gray East
and a whole life into each body breathing,
the neighborhood tree roots rumbling underground,
sea-granted, gleaming in faces at Safeway,
the yellow-stalked guilts sliding sideways
through Home Depot’s active molecular form
beyond escape, though some secret script
of nascent relief still steams on long-time pages
that would love to save us from pitch-black
asking, our progress blurring.

**

At night, headlights streak over our growth,
and the long-gone will be seen
to again become buried as we pass in light
from other galaxies reaching through us,
the night car shuddering in head-winds entering
each moment through duties forever it looks like
this far away from the birth chord
with its cure, the grain of wood
and breath revealing inner riches.

Yet the headlights themselves ignite whole pastures
of worry or some lost facility with should have,
shouldn’t have, never meant to, and could have
crackling to lightning of the mountain lions
themselves, the sea-lions and ant-lions,
and to the grackle sheen, the squirrel’s
wild sky over rhythmic long grasses
that lift with falling sea waves.

The Dalai Lama watches the rain
which flies in from Tibet
and Paris and Pacific rocks
through thick onrushes of formal planning,

the moonlit modern tractors rolling
their head-high Protestant wheels
in fields of attorney and big-tubed radio parts,
the Sunday teacher with that story of Jesus walking
beside him himself in a huge algebraic graft.

The future vice president herself notices the rain,
each molecule of water with wind in it
blowing over heavy clay, the sideways wave
of chattering from an old hotel incoming, packed
with lost voter registrations, basement-shaded,

raw economic amber showing our primordial fish
table settings, carnival woodcuts
axled through a last-century East European sky
framed by moss-mouthed fathery skeletons
still plowed out of ancient fields
and carved boyhood pledges, loosened

in the rain, then Golden Rule girlhood
flying off crows in the Norway maples,
our circling caught in its own escape,
the candlelit room with rain on the roof.

**

And the Declaration of Independence floats on the rain
that fell into dirt-path strapped-to-the-back graves
of carefully penned clauses overflowing
from brick-street medieval chancellery
walking distance from cathedral-throne.

In the rain there are so many Cherokee-spaced coughs,
now loaves of bread suddenly sliced,
coal-black philosophic flames thrown down
onto a stone floor people believe in.

Now time lost looking at the clock
has combined with colors of human hair
in sunlight, after a rain, the dust glowing

in a summer valley, a red-brown horse
of our bodies phosphorescent, late in the afternoon.