First Sleep, Second Sleep, Dream

The whole point of pastoralism

Is that the idyll realizes 

It is unreal. It is a world,

Definitely, an entire world, 

But that world suspends

From an indefinite article,

And, being complete, is complete

Enough to include a sense

Of other worlds, its own incompletion.

The city and city extensions fail

To invade that last peculiarity

Of the forest of evolving dreams.

They have their footpaths, they landscape

The architecture of their claustrophobic parks

Full of persons from all walks of whatnot,

But only seem to ingest and surround. Here,

Let me show you. The town too bright

To see anything but the moon at night

Holds bosky scraps of courtyards,

Murmuring, as if captive. The lion

In the fountain where the couple

Pretend to understand each other's lives

In the guise of lovers beyond their bodies

Thrumming to succumb is quiet,

Metaphorical plaster that growls

Because it does not belong to the town,

The couple in its fountain, the lights, 

Or the moon, such as it is among society,

But to the forest dreaming all of these

In the round realization that what is not

The darkness unadorned must have come

From somewhere else or, if not, must dim

In estimation like the solipsist's mirror, sad

To dream of reading something new,

Then to find only blanks and memories

Among the mushroomed roots.

The woods grow back and bring

Their foolish, bark-peeled pan pipes

With them, deeper and deeper, down and down.

A New Made Thing for Leah

Every creative effort
Confounds the found and the new.
There never was a making
That wasn't a borrowing,
And there are no origins
Without other origins.
God has a belly button,

The primeval is ancient,
Yggdrasil was an acorn
That fell from something older.
The past is a new made thing
At every point, a collage
Of other points conjuring
Nothing, novelty, nonsense,

The three fates of creation,
For more backwards revision,
The magic that's not magic,
Rearrangements of stones, trees,
Skeletons, galaxies, thoughts
That today is a good day
For collecting heart-shaped rocks.

Roll Credits

You know, there are such things
As professional storytellers, people
Banking on stakes, arcs, and elevations,

People who work in teams to sell
Team-crafted stories with time-honed
Precision to the wallets of the rest of us.

We like their stories. They're well told.
They target parts of us like hunters
Target hearts. They slay us.

We lie down gasping, our own
Tales in our mouths, wondering
Why we can't be among them, can't

Sell our stories with blood and guts,
But no clear arcs, no pots of gold,
No way to connect to the masses.

We are the damn masses. We consume
Stories by the lead-shot bucketful,
Never realizing we are not what we like.

Crossing

I can't begin to add them up,
The borrowed words and phrases,
From ten thousand other minds
In other times and other places

Who borrowed most of their words, too,
Nearly all of them, there and then,
From borrowers of borrowers,
Back past barrows and wild men

To that Eden no one talks about
Of the blurry, harried garden generations
Where talking in metaphors began,
First instance of each iteration

Spiraling through the ears
Of someone listening, for what?
A useful understanding, entertainment,
The one thing the garden forgot?

A Ripe Calm

When the woods are this deserted,
Ecstasies and furies settled
Back underground in caves and springs,

Only the slightly anxious wind
And the usual hungry beasts,
Horns on their heads, time in their thighs,

Wander through the quiet branches
Nibbling at the leaves and sighing
For the heavy fruit of boredom,

Exquisite, ripe, just out of reach,
The reproduction of the trees,
The overplus of memories.

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.