count all the trees —

the living, the manicured, the
frayed city trees, the countryside
trees, old growth and new,

all the petrified trees,

the fossil trees, the simply
dead and rotted trees, the 
lumber and firewood and 
kindling, bones of the lost
trees, all the oil pressed
from ancient trees;

count them, learn
their names — names of
their family, their individual names
so you can call them forth 
alive or dead; know them
by number and skin and 
leaf and root;

this is how any of it
is going to survive, 
the only way.  

we’ll have to 
do the same with rocks and
fish and birds and grasses and
all things — count them and
learn their names and 
call them up and let them
speak — and it will take a long time

so hurry: no time available
so less even than that to waste:

a tree, grown
from a hole in 
the sidewalk outside
your busted home.
start here,
this is one.  

start here.
what is its name?

Oh, my friends,

I have been reading your poems
and can see

how little water I have to add
to this sea. I pick up one of

your books, read a page,
put it down. There is no

story I can tell, no insight
I have to offer that is not

trumped by two hundred 
of your own. This is not

complaint but acknowledgment
of how much of my time

has been wasted in
contemplation of my own

need to communicate
private messages that in fact

are no more than common
firecrackers — loud, each mildly effective

on its own, terrible when taken
in their entirety;

all you do is so much more
than what I do and now all I have

is this one story of how I personally
must pass from consideration

now that I have made this 
connection. Oh, my friends,

you have done
all I thought I might do

when I started — yet
I am not envious.  It has

been done and for that reason
I am satisfied to write 

that last tale of how
I am preparing to pass on —

the only one only I can tell,
the only one that rocks only me

upon its slight waves.

To love
is to follow darkness
within you toward
its source, is to learn to see it
as shadow caused by light
and not as a scattering
of huge gray boulders
and smaller stones
impeding you. To love

is to see those shadows as 
signposts on your way
to Light, as shapes to be
learned and appreciated
for what they are; not 
to remove them, as they give
you context and heft,

but to step over and around them
or scale them as needed; 
to use them as platforms
from which to view Light
within you.  To love, then,

is to journey across. To
work a path toward.  To keep
a blank map within, and then
to fill it in.

How are you doing
with today’s harsh light?

Is there an obvious point
to be made of it, or is this day

like all others recently: 
a mystery drag that becomes a shrug

as we shake our heads and say,
“Well, what did you expect?”

Not that every day or even every
moment of every day must have a point,

of course; mostly we’re clueless
and happy enough just getting by.

Now and then, though, the light
picks up an epiphany, a shadow

glooms a space, a breeze configures
a curtain’s shape against a piece of furniture,

and this day to which we’d been oblivious 
blooms with meaning and purpose

and we agree that of all we expected of the day,
this was the least probable outcome.

Any day could hold such moments,
so again, I say, with the hard light around us

illuminating all in a stabbing flash,
how are you doing?

What has become clear
since yesterday, since ten minutes gone by,

since the day
you were born?