If all the world says something

we think then we know something

don’t we and then the blank screen

or memory again. You crazy.

No, you crazy. It’s like this

but almost always

when time-lapsed words

and weather-swept flowering trees

move in empathetic wind.

I am rooted but alive.

I am flowering and dying

I am you the wind says, the wind.

 

The embiggened afternoon

was just getting started

and to be adrift and stuck

can be a pleasant sensation

like loving abstraction

or a particular object’s nimbus.

Pick one and look at it,

human or digital, vegetable,

mineral, alive or dying,

it’s all atomic anyhow

much closer, the electron

part of yr being. Being,

it’s a small word.

After all absence makes

the particles move faster.

The path tilted up to the right

and the angled view

so dramatic in boisterous sun.

 

When a thought’s thingness begins

to move, to become unmoored,

and you ride the current

with your head and feel yourself

lift off like birdsong caught in the inner ear

even the curios seem animated

in their dusty shelves.

When the inanimate gestures back

with an imperceptible howdy

then the known sets in—

the song is alive. A scale

rendered invisibly opening onto once.

That part of tradition.

 

Birdsong and daybreak,

are they not the same at the root?

Twigs torn from brambles

nest and house this cooing thing.

Close your eyes. The notes

imprint their solar magic homing

a musical refrain built out

in a sculptural vortex and time

is this sculptural vortex—

the applause of rushes

sung into a larger sequence.

The sky. And now the word is fire,

fire in the heart, fire in the head.

Fire above and fire in bed—

seemingly the only element

to get gilded up in song.

 

How about dirt? I love you

like dirt. I miss you dirty mouth,

dirty smile, oh, and my dirt

is your dirt is nice also.

Closer to the ground, perhaps,

on the ground, that’s real enough

and those goddamn spuggies

are fledged and it’s spring

and the books in my shelves

in my head have all turned, nothing

but earth and peat and mold

and rich soft living manna

you can breathe, the must.

 

The must at the root of it all,

desire and wanting, must know.