Pastoral

Before I got here,
I wanted the poems
full of feral Siberian iris and
the sword leaves of cattails,
their cotton-bomb tops
coated in tan smoke;

now I have the poems
sticky with asphalt
and cigars, Saabs
broken down on Vermont
snow trails, starfruit
on a glass plate
in a downtown bistro.

If I seem to know the world
these days, it is because
I can still sense it distantly
through its cloak of tar
and screen of clever conversation over
well-constructed food —

but there was a time
when I could stalk the woods
alone, never speaking,
filled with One Word that was enough
until I became hungry
and then I could pull white tubers from the ground
and crawfish from the streams,
build a fire and eat well,
and still never say a thing.

This is why I will not write now
of the peregrine
on the museum eaves,
knowing how little I might have to say
is true to what I have become,

for it seems that everything
that grows or soars without speaking,
is born to be itself without being told,
is now just a symbol of something I’ve lost,
and a weekend trip to the forest spells nothing
worth repeating, and I am
starving, and noisy
with the need to speak of human things
to other humans.

I am discontented
and desire only
to be alone
with the memory of how
I could have been as animal,
as mineral, as green and dumb
with simple existence as these
better beings.

Some nights,
up here on the sixth floor
in the highest loft I can afford,
I can almost believe
it was real.  My blood in my ears.
My pulse slow as constellations
turning.  My eyes fooled
into thinking I am still
seeing things as they are.

On those nights, I sleep
soundly, and the city
fades behind the curtain
of unspeakable
divinity.

It does not last.
And I do not tell a soul
of how it is.