Meditation on the Manis Mastodon

softly        reclining       Majestic

ringed on 3 sides by littorals

fresh out of the ice,
robes of suprabundance, florabundance
whose stubble was once a feral beard of
conifers growing for close on 2500 miles.  two thousand five hundred.
north to south.

you go scouring for answers.
the mind just doesn't hold such things.

and the blueheron waits for a minnow
to make its one unlucky move of the day.
blueheron can't afford to be unlucky.

and so won't.

you're holding wet lilacs to your breast.  it is the season of lilacs.
the season of procreation and replication.  of contribution.

will you?

every now and then a purple blossom shakes free, tumbles
down your naked body, comes to rest on an erect lupine nipple
or catches in your balsamroot pubic hair -

- you brought me lilac sprigs and eucalyptus in a hard rain, in a feverish dream.

i still smell them, the scent is still fresh on my skin

of bent grasses blowing uphill in the late afternoons of
ghosts of Pleistocene pelages hunted to extinction of
songs and myths and words themselves loosed over the land wildly
around campsites and in the ashes of pre-Clovis campfires and the spilled blood
of death and birth in the first human cries of babies raised in both hands to the sky and
the last cries of
the dying

breath.  think of that.  

i think douglas fir is the shadow of god espaliered

of perfect stillness

and the rising and falling

and how good things multiply of themselves, bonum diffusivum est

 
i wake each night under Ursa Major
and each night too Lyrid meteors arc thru it
and the doug firs frame the dream-mandala like
gnarled fingers of the old earth cupped.

every night i rise to meet it one or more parts or the whole of me

o lord i jumble myself before you.
i am a solitary oxeye daisy cleaved to your supple chest.

you, love, are not god.

but an eddy, a form constantly                         wondrously                        

                 easily                           ever so briefly overcoming entropy

overcome me before you swirl away like smoke

changing