Takeaway

The last few leaves perched.

Small birds on the twigs,

Thought someone at first,

Who then laughed inside

His own head at this

Laughable mistake,

And said it aloud

To his companion,

Who then also laughed

At him, You trying

To be a poet?

Listening to them,

Their kid registered

That making mistakes

Was what poets did.

Mad

Wind’s not the only frenzy
That keeps tearing through the trees—
Not wind, not fire, not chainsaws—

Terrible but lesser things
Compared to their own madness,
Or there would be no more trees.

Two sets of teeth shred their sheets,
The ice, when it advances,
And the grasslands, burned by apes.

The woodlands have been distraught
And on the move, back and forth,
Up and down, millions of years.

To your jumpier, rootless
Species, they may seem stately,
But they ooze wounded fury.

They’re hungry as anything,
As living. They’re mad with it,
In their quiet, grasping way.

Observe how long they’ve held on.
Can you kill all of them? Not
Likely—more likely you’ll leave.

Experience Can Carry You Away

You might think you know what you
Experience—as distinct

From the flotsam and jetsam,
The detritus on the waves

Continuously streaming
Around you, sirens. You might

Think you need to stick to what
Grounds you, your experience,

But your distinction between
Solid ground and passing waves,

Between first-hand certainties
And floating complexities

Mostly garbage anyway,
Won’t survive the next earthquake.

How Does Anyone Live

With others dying,
With others being
Abandoned and killed,

Others dear to them,
Others far from them—
How anyone lives

As if living were good
And necessary
And something to plan,

Something to extend,
And not violent,
Not cruel in the end,

Hard to understand.
The body doesn’t
Ever understand.

It just keeps going
As long as it can,
Sometimes with a shriek

Circling in the mind,
Sometimes with a bland
Denial it can’t.

Trying to Survive

Humans have a long history of venerating elderflora and megaflora. They have an equally long history of burning and felling them.

Even bristlecone pines give up

The ghost, eventually, don’t they?

Ah, there’s an adverb that deserves

Its own initial capital—

Eventually. Name of a ghost,

Maybe the name of every ghost,

Eventually. Can you name lives

Not haunted by it, long or short?

Eventually, you’ll change enough,

In an instant, in a decade,

You’ll no longer count as a life,

Although your remains may vanish

Into the guts of the living

And, as part of them, keep living.

Or twirl as smoke. Or fossilize.

The Tasmanian huon pine

Is so resistant to rotting,

Trunks can lie in the ground intact

For thousands of years, refusing

To get back into life again.

Bravo to them. Eventually,

However, even their remnants,

Even petrified wood, returns,

Thanks to that ghost, to cycling

As some other distribution

Of scattered molecules, haunted,

Pulsing, some of them, surviving.