18 Rings

Walking today

Making my way

Newly over an old path

I saw another banal tragedy.

The tired earth

Our good

And patient soil

Torn and broken.

The unsteady equilibrium

Of an already disturbed place,

Nurturing things

In a quiet and

Unremarkable way.

A small parcel

Not forgotten,

Just temporarily ignored.

That lustful pause

Called investment.

Time mostly representing

Price change

And commodity fluctuation.

Not the endowing

Of unremarkable life

To unremarkable places.

I walked over the torn

And broken earth.

Small stones and gravel

Poured like vinegar

Into open wounds.

Tire tracks leading away

To faster and more complicated places

Bringing endless complication;

We know

Because we’ve seen

Where those tracks lead.

Passing by the pyre of sticks

I have come to apologize

In the self-conscious way of

Trying to be less self-conscious,

At the foot of the pile of sticks and branches

I notice stillborn spring buds

For trees always trust

The promises of spring.

The stump has 18 rings

Of varying width,

18 years of patient growth.

For this?

To extend a power line’s support.

To sink steel hooks into the earth.

But did I see the tree 

Before now?

Rockslide of Existence

Oh that I could roll away
In a rockslide of existence.
Like the lizards and the snakes;
Like the ground squirrels, or the rocks
I continually dislodge on this dusty trail.
To cascade into something greater,
Each individual plunge a mysterious
And a momentous occasion.
I see myself rolling now.
I’m smeared with brown
And green and dirt and things.
Tumbling down until my eyes only see
This lapis lazuli blue
Only smell this sagebrush
Only taste the dust between my teeth
Only see the fervid green of the oak leaves,
The mountain ash,
The brilliantly red penstemon:
All rolling together into one.
Blurring into a unity of existence.
Not a suicide,
Rather a resurrection
As my personhood is redeemed in the whole.
Not obliterated,
Not annihilated
Merely consummated.
In this ecstasy
This movement
This life
This wild breath.

Lifeless Visions

In the middle of the road

Where the asphalt runs thick

And spring heat liquefies the nearby air

Lies a bird.

It’s yellow and red

Now a lifeless vision.

—

There are many troubling questions.

How far did he fly?

Is this his native land?

Where do you bury a migratory bird?–

Should I fly down to Guatemala?

Or offer it, in some secluded spot,

To the vultures?

—

But I scrape it off the road,

Remove it from the sticky profanity

And rub away some dirt

From a secluded spot,

A place resonant with dignity–

Affirming our’s as well–

Cover it with twigs and mulch,

And whisper an apology.

—

How many bright visions

Lie lifeless on our roads?

Let us tend, then,

To our unburied dead.

Past and Future Feeling

Walking through campus

Communing with memories

Like overhearing intimate conversations.

Much easier

Than the attention

The present demands.

Lulled into a

Soft timelenssness

Blessed as much

By what I can’t remember

As what I can.

The buildings

And landscape

Have a commonplace holiness about them

Memory’s physical evidence.

The existence of all feeling

Evidently lives on.

Each student

Embodying various emotions

Versions of which

Have all been felt before.

And will be felt again.

Not a tired emulation

But an endless springing

Emotions embodied

Over and over

Alchemized in new

And beautiful combinations.

Every emotional state

I’ve lived here

Lives on here.

The overwhelming stress

Flattening self-consciousness

Awkward nervousness

Grim satisfaction

End-of-semester catharsis

And more.

It’s all still here.

Which is comforting

In a way difficult to explain.

The wheels of emotion

May turn us

And weary us

But we can’t weary it.

And the world

Never wearies of it

Or us.

Isn’t this some form of immortality?