From down here, it feels
there's nothing
there, but when you're in it
up there, lit
bright blue or a shadowed navy,
the air lets you feel it,
and how it could let you
go, if it didn't love you

so. It will let you pick through
its pockets. They're yours.
All of its is in you,
and it's yours. You're its too,
when you're up there, or down here.
You'll forget this, but not the way
you forget which shirt you wore
after sitting too long in the dark. No,

you'l forget it the way you've forgotten
how gorgeous a stand of trees can be until
you've seen them again from above, them
down here standing in their grassy, mossy,
rolling places. And it's then, you'll forget
you were just telling yourself
how useless and tedious though true
this life can be. Not when you're in it.

They are. What are we becoming?
It's rote, I know. It's rote.
It all bares my repeating. He wrote,

though not to me,
"The first prerequisite of defiling
a corpse is a corpse."
And I thought, Of course.
We've become
experts in their making. And his point,

the point I didn't think
needed making, not at this point,
again, yes, again,
yet again,
is how many we're making.
We're making them

without a second thought
or guess.
With an ease and a quickness,

and we're finding them,
once made,
hard to be rid of, hard
not to accept
as ours, except
when we've become them.

Wherever you start, there's a beginning,
it said,
beginning to lure me into its crystalline
blue, dotted
not by dots but by blurs of a deeper blue.
You knew
all along, as long as you could, it couldn't, you
couldn't, keep you
in the where there where you were. It did, not long,
but long
enough to learn. I followed it then, not wanting
to stop. Long,
it stopped and turned and smiled back at me, us,
a grin
tall at both ends. It wouldn't end till mine was just
beginning.

My religion says,
all this lively life is
precious,
not just the human kind.

It says,
there are no heavenly ups or hellish downs,
there's is,
and it's all around us.

It says,
there's not one way for love to love,
unless
it's without even this condition.

It says,
all we know is
so much less
than what we can imagine,

and it imagines
a universe of expanding beauty,
one or many
in a one that's universally beautiful

and never wasted,
not the tiniest bit of it,
even as we slip
away then back into it.

I’ve read the news, and its red
with painted lip prints, and the stain
of stranger thumb prints. They’re not
mine. Neither of them. They belong,
lip and thumb, paint and stranger,
singularly to those others who don’t

read or write such things. They may
bleed them, but the blood isn’t red,
or crimson, or cardinal, or scarlet.
Pick a shade of red, and it isn’t that,
at least not until it’s too, too late
to stanch. The bully’s standard is to take

it all, all of it except the fall crisp that led
into this strangely warmer winter. I took it,
and I saved it in my bones to prepare,
but the cold didn’t come. Not like we
were used to. I’m told the bully wears
what he takes with a dashing style. See it,

that royal blue that outfits him? The flowing
robes? The gold. I’ve been robbed. We have
been. Not of things, but of a view. A view
with no room for us in its downside-up
very periscope-unlike perspective.
There’s no upside to the up-down

and just around the corner trips
I take. To the grocer. To the bar. To
the five and dime. It’s fattened up
to a dollar. And the slimming newsprint
costs more than what I get
without the print. I don’t

get it, not the print, not the paper, not
the red lip prints, not the thumbprints
left by strangers, not the news
I’ve read and I’m reading.

We’re on the cusp,

a pin-***** gleam on the lip of a cup,
and we’re running. Over

and over, we’ve held it.

We’ve raised it up,
this golden
cup filled with the sacrifice
of time, time and time again,
until its weight gets too much,
or our arms too fat to hold it. Much longer,

and longer than that, the shadows go,
and they’ll continue to grow now. Our fancy cup’s
at the tipping, with its time spilling out
twenty-four hours
a day into the forest of roots

loosing their grip on the slime-drenched
soil. Little Juramaia once played here,
and Gaia hasn’t forgotten her. Could she

forget us, or the trees? She can’t

feel the **** frost for the trees,
or us, when it’s gone,
and the trees have gone tipsy
at the thought. That,

and this lengthening light.

We aren’t, necessarily, up. Beat not

beaten, we feast, and we will be. Come,
tell me, what information can’t be held in

our fatty acids? Immodestly, we’ve had both
the morsel modified and not. Its tiny bits mix
in us and with us, so it can inform us

forward with a digestibly new identity. We have
eaten more than this too, and it’s all in us,
with the knowledge of a world less well-preserved.
Less is on ice, but there’s more for us to taste,

and it’s the more and we’re the more. We
know of it, what it is that can’t get inside of us
if we don’t eat it. Let it, get inside, it won’t
eat at us. It won’t, it can’t shake us from

the unusual way we’ve wobbled through
a closely-measured firmament cold-packed
with these immeasurable clues. We’re no less

permanent there than this half-shell is here. Fixed
by a thin glaze, it awaits one sun, or the tide’s finding

its stomach again for mollusk, fine sand and pebbles.