called you from your idle

dream-workshop with the subtle spanners,

half-speeches, after keeping

you up late as my youth last night, later

than the gods’ twilight, who witnessed your trials

at fixing kinks in my causal body, just before sleep.

(Though I guess now that gods do sleep, I don’t know where.)

I watched a star burn through your wall-length windows

—no sun of ours, we were long past

midnight—resplendent fire raging far more

distant, more dead. Pur ti miro, you showed me,

Pur ti stringo, pur ti godo. I felt closer than

ever to inspiration—each breath into passive lungs—

while your fingers pressed behind my neck.

Pur t’annodo: I enchain you, I tie you down.

You left me asleep on the couch, and I thought by

dawn I’d sneak in beside your soul. But

a blessed light came disrupting the blind-

fold and blinds, and instead I woke you with Wagner.

Night after night, what she saw in her sleep: 
an upside down Havdalah candle like the one she lit 
to usher in a new week at the end of every Sabbath,

praying, “Blessed God, who separates light from dark …” 

The candle in her dreams, like her real candle, 
had four wicks and four braided strands of wax, 
but produced no flames, only entrails of light.

And she dreamt God unhinged the constellations 
and whisked away the stars. Uncreating. Uncreating.
The pitch darkness: a grave she couldn’t find a way out of.

And she dreamt she was a stone a crow lifted 
and tucked into the wind:
a girl born to memory that hushes the sun
and takes the place of trees’ shadows.

When she woke, the war still raged
and the sky hardened into rock.

She wondered: why is God doing this?
And the thunder thundered: why are people doing this?  

Despair swooping over her, her grief a kind of wingspan.

Delirious as the rain the river guzzled,
she became a stranger to herself,
circling her own shadow, searching for her beliefs,
her mind like shattered glass,

and the world stuck in her throat like a bone—

An owl winks in the shadows
A lizard lifts on tiptoe, breathing hard
Young male sparrow stretches up his neck,
                   big head, watching—

The grasses are working in the sun. Turn it green.
Turn it sweet. That we may eat.
Grow our meat.

Brazil says “sovereign use of Natural Resources”
Thirty thousand kinds of unknown plants.
The living actual people of the jungle
        sold and tortured—
And a robot in a suit who peddles a delusion called “Brazil”
        can speak for them?

        The whales turn and glisten, plunge
                and sound and rise again,
        Hanging over subtly darkening deeps
        Flowing like breathing planets
              in the sparkling whorls of
                     living light—

And Japan quibbles for words on
        what kinds of whales they can kill?
A once-great Buddhist nation
        dribbles methyl mercury
        like gonorrhea
                      in the sea.

Pere David's Deer, the Elaphure,
Lived in the tule marshes of the Yellow River
Two thousand years ago—and lost its home to rice—
The forests of Lo-yang were logged and all the silt &
Sand flowed down, and gone, by 1200 AD—
Wild Geese hatched out in Siberia
        head south over basins of the Yang, the Huang,
        what we call “China”
On flyways they have used a million years.
Ah China, where are the tigers, the wild boars,
                   the monkeys,
                      like the snows of yesteryear
Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground
Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks.
IS man most precious of all things?
—then let us love him, and his brothers, all those
Fading living beings—

North America, Turtle Island, taken by invaders
        who wage war around the world.
May ants, may abalone, otters, wolves and elk
Rise! and pull away their giving
        from the robot nations.

Solidarity. The People.
Standing Tree People!
Flying Bird People!
Swimming Sea People!
Four-legged, two-legged people!

How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist
Government     two-world     Capitalist-Imperialist
Third-world     Communist      paper-shuffling male
             non-farmer     jet-set     bureaucrats
Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil?

(Ah Margaret Mead . . . do you sometimes dream of Samoa?)

The robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth
To last a little longer
                    like vultures flapping
Belching, gurgling,
                    near a dying doe.
“In yonder field a slain knight lies—
We'll fly to him and eat his eyes
                    with a down
         derry derry derry down down.”

             An Owl winks in the shadow
             A lizard lifts on tiptoe
                         breathing hard
             The whales turn and glisten
                         plunge and
             Sound, and rise again
             Flowing like breathing planets

             In the sparkling whorls

             Of living light.

                      Stockholm: Summer Solstice 40072

On cloudy Sundays clouds are in my heart
as if my brother came, as if the rain
lingered among the mushrooms and the art
of freedom washed into the murder train
or rinsed the peat bog soldiers of the camp.¹
On cloudy Sundays clouds are with Joe Hill.
Last night I dreamt he was alive. The tramp
was mining clouds for thunder. And uphill
into the clouds I feel that time descends,
as if my mother came, as if the moon
were flowering between the thighs of friends
and gave us fire. On Sundays when the swan
of death circles my heart, the cloudy noon
rolls me gaping like dice, though I am gone. 

^{1. The peat bog soldiers were prisoners of war in the Börgerniir Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxony. The song was composed in German by inmates and sung by thousands of inmates as they marched with their digging spades instead of rifles. It became a resistance song in many languages during World War II. In his resonant voice Paul Robeson famously sang it both in German and English.}

^{Wir sind die Moorsoldaten
und ziehen mit dem Spaten ins Moor.
Wir sind die Moorsoldaten
und ziehen mit dem Spaten ins Moor.}

^{We are the peat bog soldiers,
Marching with our spades to the moor.
We are the peat bog soldiers,
Marching with our spades to the moor.}

^{—after Kaveh Akbar’s “Poetry and Spirituality”}

Before me Kawishiwi stretches— 
river a palette of frost. Nearby  
glazed berries dot the cranberry bushes, 
melt into mirage. Icicles 
too drip remembrance.

But metaphors of a world asleep  
fail this place where even now 
a pileated woodpecker beats a rhythm  
of search—repeats, day by day deeper.  
Watch while the leafless oak opens.

Beneath the protective skin 
of tree, more hard-shelled beings— 
bark beetles, exoskeletons of ants. 
Hear the purr of wings landing,  
jarring rattle as head recites hunger. 

Watch the red blur of devotion—  
manic as our soul, our alone. 
Yet steadily each body maps resilience. 
Where survival turns with planet,  
chases the sun, wait is a courage

we name winter. Beneath ice 
mink, muskrat, and otter swim, 
stalk sleek shadows of fish.  
Woodland dwellers find feast each season— 
oh despair, make that your gospel.

Still, forest grandmothers—all roots 
trunks and limbs—uphold their pact. 
In rhythm of warm days and freezing  
nights, tree roots suction, sap spills 
through bark wounds. Then our tongues 
sticky with spring—then, our song. 

But, in January, we hold this promise. 
While lake ice shifts, dark a murmur, 
a creak. Now moonlight falls on snow crusts— 
always where two touch, night glistens. 
When distant wolf howls, answer comes.

Imagine the upturned muzzle, body  
a triangle of sound. Hazel eyes  
mere slits. This reverence—an ancient hunger 
for pack. See, too, each black branch; 
limbing—bare, suspended in soon.

How pristine the listening posture 
of pine marten, of fisher, of fox— 
each body cocked. To pounce, to dive 
nose-first into snow’s secrets, 
to search winter tunnels for mice.

We, too, poised like supplicants— 
rawness of the world a prayer 
we read but cannot speak. Silence 
an invocation, heavy as tobacco  
sinking into snow—into earth’s altar.

Against moon’s brilliance, slit your eyes. 
Let warmth of reflected light fill you; 
that holy—that glance of tiny gods. 
Make of your hands an empty globe, 
your body a vessel taut as river.