shall clap as they go out with joy

the earth is a strange creature
with her lungs flung out wide in the blue sky
her breath billows down
rich and tender
warm
all summer

you hear her best
in the trees, her shoosh
her chhhh, chhhh
her bending down and her rough
gentle hands
and up, up from her deep heart
they come thick
and cracked
and her skirts sway in the willow wands
and her eyes like sun in the leaves

do not be offended
or afraid though she
wants your body back, patiently
she asks so gentle, so gentle
ready now?
are you, are you, are you
ready?

he just keep rollin'

I.
the bank here
is about 6 feet high
in a circle of little stones
someone has left flower petals
and the river runs on
in its ignorant way, slightly absurd
like ink
into which no pen will ever dip.

not that anyone does that now, of course,
nor would they recognize
how the silt that slips into your sandals
when you go down to the water
feels like the city soot
from which, in hardened bricks, ink once was ground.

II.
in the evening, just after sunset
the strong young river
looks dirty as a fresh grave,

churns rocks, flicks away earth
like the tail of a mountain mule
tends flies,

shoulders the silt
till it spills in the south
where it's breath comes slow,
wheezing through flats
far down
below the level of
its bluffs.

III.
somehow we always have known
that death is a river
and its inanimate flow
hallows every bridge,
farewell its one
word.
when the boats cut along
their silver lines
the moon ripples
over her silent creatures
and god comes flowing down
through the green ash, cottonwood,
hickory, oak and willow.

settle when the spirit says settle

After reading a chapter of a certain book (not a factual book, precisely, but a book about life, one might say), I found myself thinking--aha, I believe I learned a new thing just there, at that one part. But really, to say I read these hundreds and thousands of words, and learned one new thing. What a disgusting sort of idea, to be so immune. Because, supposing one comes to the point where there is no longer any possibility of a new thought. Imagine this with me--we cannot mean that we know and understand everything, of course. That is not the reason for our immunity. It is simply that we have come to the end of our ability to entertain a thought beyond. Beyond...what? But this is exactly it, we could no more answer that question now than to think the thought we had missed.

So now, our reading (or, far more telling if you are sensitive to this sort of thing, our conversation) consists of what? But this is the part that will really devastate one. As you read, you feel no more than a shifting of the furniture of your brain, or let's even say your soul. A temporary realignment of this idea and that idea to make the simulacrum of a new idea. But there is never any particular reason for these things to be aligned in one way or another way (since by definition a simulacrum will be quite secondary) and like chunks of brightly colored play-doh, eventually it is even by the clumping and re-clumping that a hard, sort of brown color is achieved which further recombining, though it should change the shape and cast, can do nothing to erase or alter. No, those that insist that there must be one particular arrangement or another, they should be patted on the back, really, for trying to do us all a certain type of favor.

For, after all, it is only sensible, as I just was writing in the post below, to suggest that at a point in development one comes to the part where it has generally been no longer necessary to go on learning things at some great rate (or even a slow rate, as some of us have been blessed with). Deep within your sort of evolutionary blueprint there is a sort of plaster. Beyond here, you are supposed to be fairly functional. You are no longer supposed to have to be figuring things out. This means the pliability of one's mind somehow ceases to be an asset, because growth, which had made that pliability useful and necessary, has slowed. To be fair, we should probably specify that it would be less artificially depressing if we suggest that the nature of growth has perhaps merely changed (do you start to observe this brown color now?), and it is no longer necessary to expand oneself. Let's take, for example, the possibility that it is simply necessary to harden oneself.

It is self-evident that this will be a dangerous sort of business.

one's golden age behind one

there is a time of late evening
out on the street
i believe the world will seem strange
in its quiet the stillness of a city
which is an active stillness
and it begins to seem as
if you are supposed to come to a
point at which you have grown comfortable

with each of these things such as
flies clustering the light
by the picnic table in
the park
but even more, with the parked cars
and the manicured lawns
and yet the barking dog which gets its
"shaddap"

it is not that this is supposed to be "it"
but it is it, made in the way
of smilarities. look at it this way
what is it that you are, floating along this imaginary street
the real thing...even that you cannot answer
now. the very idea is disturbing
like the wooded part along the dark walk.
the price of releasing
the hope of some deep, resounding truth
is not so very much, after all
you must admit. and there are
many almost things, but of these
the most real falsity is a thing
alive in itself. This makes
no sense, but is true
again and again.

at some point it is assumed
that you function pretty well.
that this requires
an ignorance of the strangeness of
bats or by what process they developed
their echo-location is not problematic;
that, equally, your own blindness and saggy
skin might make you an aeronaut is a conceit
that has no particular resonance in this dark;
the game is gobbling the insects, but even this
fact is not well known. hard work has its own
utility, it can't be denied, and just one small example
is the calloused hand, useful for so many tasks
precisely by lack of sensation to any task.
in this case, if i were to say your skin
feels like the ear of a yearling doe when she
stands erect and flaring, with the dew clinging to the tips
of her perfect, slender legs and the water of the pond, in the early morning mist, trembling
from the recent touch of her lips

if i were to say that
the truth of it is equivalent to the manicured
lawn of the split-level on the corner except
this is the truth
which which we should be
becoming comfortable
though such statues secretly make one raise a fist

but i wouldn't say it now
such a thing. yet i will believe those things
all of them
like i believe the stillness of an evening on a city street
like i believe the quiet by the distant sounds of cars and trucks
all the golden age behind one by photograph, memorable, statuesque.

though in every age people after all did live, not knowing if it were golden.