The Most Incredible Thing
I learned how to say hello:
Hello, Mississippi river! Hello, silver silver silver gray!
Hello, dog! You are barking wildly at me. Hello!
I felt like Santa Claus or God—a jolly God,
that is. A pale yellow flower
growing on top of a mountain, or at least at the highest place
possible for things to grow.
I felt like the dry socket of some old moon or river
gradually filling up with water, water, water.
Water, hello. Hello, cool, clear, bitter movement.
Humility—yes humility is the strength of creation,
not knowledge or boredom or shape.
Hello, humility. Hello, being full of being.
Hello, imagination, you tiny horse. Hello,
gallop and gallop and gallop!
We are Jealous of Music
We fought with a tree and sadly
Both of us were right
Water in a lake remaining true to its blue
Outside of animal/ physical boundaries
Snow dragging black clouds apart
Never stopped to apologize
Where there’s friendship there’s agony
The sparrow vs. the whale, in love
Now everything is stung by the bee
Little chickadees in the tree’s branches
The whale doesn’t love them as much
Violence tells us what we already know
A whale is born at the sunrise
Water goes wherever it wants
The black panther in Illinois passes
Leaves the skins of three miniature schnauzers
We have animals everywhere
People you love disappear
And there hang, in gallows of brain
Passing explosion of one person’s presence
Clumsy sound of black bear jumping off the tree
And large furry ass of it runs down the mountain
With legs like the tree plus the ocean
And we want to say yes in a black and blue way
The moonflowers (white) will open
Though we might never see them
The man (in joy) will tie a ribbon in his hair
The cows will push amorously and break the fence
And then trample the garden and eat up the fennel bulbs
And smell sweet then, like three-fourths of the moon
So long farewell old numbers!
We can’t count with you anymore
Music hurts when it’s outside of us
Like a perfectly planted row of basil
Or watching a bear lift its eyebrows
Because it ate your honey and eggs
Or because it’s mad at you
That you have misrepresented
Black panthers and sparrows and bears
However there are violets
Lake Life
Rivers may run but I always ripple.
When you’re a child-lake it’s called lapping.
In rippling I am cutting space: smooth then jagged then smooth.
Things leap out of me. I am on fire with living things
and now they swoop into me. Coke can. Fish flip.
It feels very good to be even just one word inside this poem,
like how it feels good to be one little thing inside a lake.
My eyes stretch and stretch, as open as outer space.
I feel first the sun hissing, second each star biting into me a little
as they settle and revolve. It becomes night.
The moon presses into my body.
She likes me.
A cloud flies between us.
We like everything and the cloud is included.
I used to think in glacial lappings when I was a baby.
Now, it is huge gray rocks.
It is weird to be a poem like this.
When I say poem in this poem, I think you must think I mean lake.
My identity is mostly water. First I am water. Second I am the Lake.
Third I am plants and rocks. Fourth I am animals.
The water part (first) is similar to sky. I like this poem.
It’s a poem written by a lake. The Lake.
It’s a picking up of water and moving it to another place. Like the sun.
I’m not like you—I’m not an animal. I don’t want to be loved.
I like air first. I am huge and I have a brain.
I have killed and killed and vomited. I’m nature, tons of nature.
You love nature but I don’t want to be loved. I am a poem that likes itself.
Some of us aren’t destined for dusty death.
I know you will turn to dust.
I am a lake poem as well as the lake writing this poem because
there is no difference.
Except I am never going to die.
