Doesn’t just happen when sleeping and dreaming.
What stirs the leaves when there’s no wind?
What stands up the tall grasses?
Why do seeds float in timelessness?
Why can light appear like shimmering water?
Why, when we are well,
do we almost disappear into joy,
And the body sometimes feels
Like it’s floating on a cushion of air?
But maybe everything is wind—
the light, the clouds, the earth itself,
rotating in its weightless orbit.
Ah, it’s change that’s weightless. Problem solved.

Rotting food and rotting children
The rot of the heart
And decomposition of spirit
The oxidation of conscience
Microbes consume us
If there are rotting children
In the world
It is because spirit is starving
For a solution
That is beyond itself

Did anyone else see it today?
Gallons of goldfinches
Poured out of the clouds,
Like gold coins were falling,
Like the wings of the sun
Were coming undone.
Some flocked, and others scattered,
Singing and flying
Like improvised jazz,
Like the music of joy,
Like playthings of peace—
Heard and seen,
But just out of reach.

My head was full of the sun’s *****
It could give birth to anything
It could impregnate death with poems

The earth was my bed
Nature was my wife
I was the father of dreams

Green ants covered branches
I said to the flower bloom
And it bloomed with mirrors inside

In spectral graveyards
Every grave is a garden
Of grasses and moonflowers

When I stood
My head cleared the clouds
Who knew the moon
Could be touched by real poems

First its stillness held me captive—
A fox snake in the grass.
Then, when I nudged it,
It rattled its tail to fool me.
When it curled up
Into a striking position,
It was like copper melting,
The essence of hydraulics
Came into view,
Like a rope of water
Collapsing into itself.
Strangest of all
Was how energized
I was by the encounter,
Like I’d been envenomated
With energy venom,
Or a spirit snake
Was crawling round my spine,
And I too was seeking the sun.

I’ll share this photograph of my parents with you.
It’s like an old wine overflowing time, still new.
They’re eighteen and twenty-four, in their best poor clothes,
Posing under an olive branch on a Roman road.
The picture is classically imbued; they, permeated
By natural light like actors in a neorealist film
Embraced in some final frame of desperate justice.
The photograph arrests the wind of the day, that moment,
Blowing blades of blurring grasses into living inertia,
Light pregnant even in the stones and shadows;
And there’s something more, something magical,
Beyond youth and beauty, a divinity being born,
Cupid bending the olive branch, the arrow flown.

When I did peyote,
I heard ceremonial drums,
impossible to place,
and chanting, low and rising.
Later, I told the shaman on the reserve
about the drums, the chanting,
and he said, "The spirits liked you,
that's why the earth was drumming,
that's why the spirits were singing."
That was nice to hear.
Better, I thought, to be liked by the spirits
than by what passes for humanity.