I wander like a hawk
above the possibility of prey,
I wander like the wind.
Just like the land beneath these feet,
these feet that walk over this land
and the sensations of these feet walking over this land
are not owned by me but by the timber company.
Their signage is everywhere, and their machinery,
and their creation and destruction,
these traces of their true nature,
which remains invisible.
To summarize: here on this forest road,
betweeen thickets of trees, I am trespassing.
The yellow and black striped warning tape was cut,
it waves quietly in the wind.
Other than humans, who have drawn up
many nutrients from the soil, and proliferated,
large animals are few and barely reveal themselves.
One gallops by while my sight is closed
and my attention is mostly in my limbs.
Another takes off, or dives, in the cover of the brush,
from one unknown realm to another,
as I continue along the exposed trail.
There are ways that the light falls in the thicket
only.
Falling asleep, I am haunted by the day’s work.
A stone kneeling beside me in the garden
flashes me a message as
I kill the thistle and teasel,
with whom I live and die.
I listen to the muffled memories
of the ghost of the creek
as I choke it with coarse debris.
Over and over I drive an axe into the bark
of a fallen tree, to gain purchase and to peel,
to discover the messages that were sent
between the skin and the flesh.
The meeting hall chants along;
it has its own creaks to work out.
The bamboo moves through its own
subtle asanas, and keeps becoming.
The world isn’t flat, I heard it fold under a bird’s wing.
So that knowledge appeared in the pocket of an ear
and then climbed into a poem.
If you pass through the pines,
and make a second effort,
you’ll find that the creek still lives.
There is the sky, right on the earth,
rippling as the birds ring
and insects laugh and light dances.
The light, and hence the dark, attends
to everything, and I follow. When I depart,
I am caught by the vines, who have missed me.