Enthusiasm and Confluence
When my neighbor’s brush pile rose
limb by limb until I saw that it had grown
above his head, I thought he’d bonfire it,
perhaps on New Year’s Eve. Grass grows
with tiny twitches we rarely notice.
A beetle could be squeezing a patient path
between thick stalks, or the earth itself
might be shrugging in Asia, or wherever.
One branch and wheelbarrow dump at a time
his pile inched up from a squat beaver’s lodge
to the girth of a Mongol nomad’s yurt,
until it loomed so all-of-a-sudden tall
that a gust-whipped flame might leap across
to lick his house shingles or set the woods
and our whole world afire. I’d looked forward
to a glad conflagration, red sparks churning
into black night, but the furtive warming
of decay will be its sole burn, a secret heat
that builds in hay bales barned too soon.
The eerie yelping of coyotes rampaging
through our neighborhood in the fell hours
awoke me. To where were they racing?
To no predestination, but wherever a spirit
left them, it’s no hazard for me to guess.
Does one bird in a flock or one special fish
in its school decide the swerve of the whole,
or does some daemon pull them all?
At first sun I could not resist wading
to the pile to examine the circle they trampled
in fresh March snow when they’d detoured
from deep-night wilding to lope a circuit
about its circumference, sniffing a potpourri
of delicious stinks. It harms me not at all
to imagine Puritans possessed by succubi
frolicking in naked satanic ecstasy
around a bonfire in a wilderness clearing,
giant shadows bouncing in a grotesque dance
across somber pines. Nor will it help me.
I cannot see what the night-seeing vole
can see in her scurrying scramble through
that fretted labyrinth, and yet my mind
at any time I will it to can follow her passage
through that dark maze to her snug nest
she finds by remembrance of a musky stench,
a knowing of both sense and mind as one.
And, if I wish to, I can I curl up with her
and her wee hairless babes in fragrant grasses
and acrid leaves atop her hoard of seeds.
But does reason or understanding allow me
to see dragons snoring atop plundered jewels
encrusted in belly plates they cannot spend
but keep for beauty’s sake alone. I saw
in a gash of scarlet in the churned snow trail
a split paw pad. It is not so, and yet it is.
For a mouse in the mind is as much a mouse
as any mouse in nature, even if a lucid eye
perceives it not. I saw the crow’s trident marks,
the small baseball mitts with tiny claws
where a raccoon came to paw away a twig or two,
and I was glad enough to be still alive
to hear in the coyotes’ unworldly yodeling
a rejoicing at the certain agony of love,
and knowing as a warm sun rose I’d leave
no trace.
limb by limb until I saw that it had grown
above his head, I thought he’d bonfire it,
perhaps on New Year’s Eve. Grass grows
with tiny twitches we rarely notice.
A beetle could be squeezing a patient path
between thick stalks, or the earth itself
might be shrugging in Asia, or wherever.
One branch and wheelbarrow dump at a time
his pile inched up from a squat beaver’s lodge
to the girth of a Mongol nomad’s yurt,
until it loomed so all-of-a-sudden tall
that a gust-whipped flame might leap across
to lick his house shingles or set the woods
and our whole world afire. I’d looked forward
to a glad conflagration, red sparks churning
into black night, but the furtive warming
of decay will be its sole burn, a secret heat
that builds in hay bales barned too soon.
The eerie yelping of coyotes rampaging
through our neighborhood in the fell hours
awoke me. To where were they racing?
To no predestination, but wherever a spirit
left them, it’s no hazard for me to guess.
Does one bird in a flock or one special fish
in its school decide the swerve of the whole,
or does some daemon pull them all?
At first sun I could not resist wading
to the pile to examine the circle they trampled
in fresh March snow when they’d detoured
from deep-night wilding to lope a circuit
about its circumference, sniffing a potpourri
of delicious stinks. It harms me not at all
to imagine Puritans possessed by succubi
frolicking in naked satanic ecstasy
around a bonfire in a wilderness clearing,
giant shadows bouncing in a grotesque dance
across somber pines. Nor will it help me.
I cannot see what the night-seeing vole
can see in her scurrying scramble through
that fretted labyrinth, and yet my mind
at any time I will it to can follow her passage
through that dark maze to her snug nest
she finds by remembrance of a musky stench,
a knowing of both sense and mind as one.
And, if I wish to, I can I curl up with her
and her wee hairless babes in fragrant grasses
and acrid leaves atop her hoard of seeds.
But does reason or understanding allow me
to see dragons snoring atop plundered jewels
encrusted in belly plates they cannot spend
but keep for beauty’s sake alone. I saw
in a gash of scarlet in the churned snow trail
a split paw pad. It is not so, and yet it is.
For a mouse in the mind is as much a mouse
as any mouse in nature, even if a lucid eye
perceives it not. I saw the crow’s trident marks,
the small baseball mitts with tiny claws
where a raccoon came to paw away a twig or two,
and I was glad enough to be still alive
to hear in the coyotes’ unworldly yodeling
a rejoicing at the certain agony of love,
and knowing as a warm sun rose I’d leave
no trace.
