Do you still believe in borders now?  

Birds soar over your maps and walls, and always have.     

You might have watched how the smoke from your own fires  

travelled on wind you couldn’t see    

                                            wafting over the valley

and up and over the hills and over the next valley and the next hill.

Did you not hear the animals howl and sing?   

Or hear the silence of the animals no longer singing?   

Now you know what it is to be afraid.  

You think this is a dream?  It is not

a dream.    You think this is a theoretical question?  

What do you love more than what you imagine is your singular life?   

The water grows clearer.  The swans settle and float there.    

Are you willing to take your place in the forest again?    to become loam and bark

to be a leaf falling. from a great height.  to be the worm who eats the leaf

and the bird who eats the worm?    Look at the sky: are you

willing to be the sky again?  

                                              You think this lesson is 

too hard for you    You want the time-out to end.  You want

to go to the movies as before, to sit and eat with your friends.

It can end now, but not in the way you imagine    You know

the mind that has been talking to you for so long—the mind that

can explain everything?    Don’t listen.
 

You were once a citizen of a country called I Don’t Know.

Remember the burning boat that brought you there?   Climb in.

^{(after Stephen Hawking)}

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money—

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?
There was no   Nature.    No
 them.   No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
—when we were ocean    and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all—nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.