Fifty/Fifty

For Sarah

1. Sheep Bridge

Why would a bridge require
Anything from its burdens?
It's not alive. It doesn't aspire
To anything certain.

It's an arrangement
Of tar and stones, cement and wood,
A momentary estrangement
Of gravity's evil and good.

One asks these things, sheepishly,
Knowing they're rhetorical,
Swaying a little, sleepily,
In suspense above the portal.

2. Beam

You wouldn't think the deep woods
Had a bridge in the middle
Unless you were the deep woods,
And dropping logs in ravines
Was what you did in a storm
When the winds get too gruesome
For any kind of thinking.

If you are the woods, you know
Ravines belong to themselves
And are none of your affair.
Some days must be sacrificed
To throw beams across water,
A few to last as archways
Between might be, isn't, and were.

3. Branches of the Log Supine

What do we have now, however
We got here? Retracing
Is an option tempting
As falling. The ants,

Those complicated sisters,
Comprehend the skin
Of the last one over among them
To wonder on the other side.

There's no reorientation
For the green magician,
Barely time to make camp
Among the unknown fictions.

Retreating into Dreams Is Frightening

It's midnight in the forest,
And while the moon is out and clear,
Homes invisible to daylight reappear
As what they are, not houses,
Not cottages in which faeries live,

Just sheer projections of forest,
Inessential, durable gossamer,
The places that thoughts retreat
Into when they are not thoughts

But dreams, nothing much at all

Like sunny thoughts that think ways

Through the rustling hunger of leaves
And needles for a daylight stronger
Than these disturbing reflections
The moony midnight homes provide.

The Stranger

One morning we wake to discover
We are what we wanted to be,

What we wanted first to be,
Before we had any idea

Of what it would be like to be
Ourselves and what we wanted,

To be what we wanted to be ourselves
And not what we envied in others.

All the intermediate wishes fall away.
We have failed to be someone else,

We have not second-guessed ourselves well,
We have suited up in uniforms and certifications,

Robes and elaborate prostheses,
Each fitting like a glove fits a bear's paw.

We are what we knew we wanted to be
Before we knew the satisfaction or the cost,

Before we felt constrained by our wishes
And their endless imperfections,

Before we or anyone really knew,
Other than that tall, gaunt, unknown man,

Already dying, who knocked on the door
One morning near the beginning of grown-up things

And asked in a theatrical voice
Husked by cigarettes and cancer

To see the poet.

Berghaus im Wald

The forest forgets when it began
To forget. There's no way to detect
A hole in the middle of the world;

There's no world there to detect.
The forest doesn't know this. It can't.
It sets out new leaves. Seedlings flourish.

The seasons confirm enduring things.
Snow, ice, retreat, rain, mud, flourishing,
The green-gold cathedrals of summer,

Eternal transience of autumn,
That gorgeous gypsy of surrender.
Snow, ice, retreat, rain, mud, flourishing.

The regularities of being
A summary of being alive
All contribute to the whispering

Of wishes among the short-lived leaves
Who believe they alone are martyrs
To a forever that transcends them.

An Interesting Character

Where does one find such a thing?
Everyone wants one
Wants the power to be one
Or invent one
Everyone knows one 
Or many or a few
Although almost no one
Has one under control

I saw one down in a well
When I was little enough
To be one myself
I thought I could make my own

I wish I could bring it back 
Into life now, I wish
I could wrap it up to sell
To other well-wishers

Who would only buy because
They were still wishing
To capture one to sell themselves 

Life in an Expanding Universe

The last time I knew, we lived
In an expanding universe, the woman
Who wore her hair in a white tower
Piled on her head said to the old man

Who was nodding off even as he shuffled
Alongside slowly in the organic aisle,
His frizzy temples bobbing
In the gently mechanical breeze.

Or maybe he was just nodding wisely,
Who can tell with old men nodding?
He seemed distant, either way, increasingly
Distant from everyone, to me.

The Hermit's Gossip

In the space between once and now, a storyteller lived in the greenwood, doing his job, explaining the forest to itself. . .

When a wind moves through the leaves, it moves you with them, it moves you along away from them.

When there is no wind, you settle back onto the branches and into the ground between the roots.

No one tree can claim to make you, and all the trees together make you, but when the trees are quiet there's no you that you know of, no you at all, although everything that will be you again is still being made as quickly as ever. You replenish.

When they can, the leaves release you. You are all the things they send to each other, altogether, the whole conversation, not the phrases.

Never mind the birds and squirrels, nor any of the nuisances and monsters that carry bits of you off and trouble you. Never fight the wind. It can or cannot carry you. You cannot carry yourself.

You were born because the trees that lived were best at floating their signals simultaneously in the softest and wildest winds, the same.

You will think you are the wind because its movements bring you. You are the use of the wind for the trees to say long winded formulas that are you.

Because you are always in that circling wind, there is no mirror for you but those formulas that remake you in long fragments that begin

In the space between once and now, a storyteller lived in the greenwood, doing his job, explaining the forest to itself. . .