An array of sensitive instruments calibrated and raised into boxes
or lowered beneath fields of thinning ice, against the push of wind,
the rapture of scudding clouds, the glare of sunlight where Earth's
sphincter is Man's "brute entrance into the violence of being alive."

There's a wisdom in old growth forests emanating from the trees,
a feeling of They know how to grow, even smelling different from
stands of militant corporate trees planted for cutting down. Thus:

My words are tied in one / With the great mountains,
With the great rocks, / With the great trees, / In one
with my body / And my heart.

Can we "fly out over there, beyond oneself, to what is not oneself"
without slowly disappearing? The wind stronger, the sun brighter,
the water bottle croaks like an elder frog whose pond
is polluted, while the clear notes of a flute swim up to
the bubbling mouth of a mountain stream.

 

 

 

brute entrance: M. Piercy, He, She and It. New York,1991.
My words: H.J. Spinden, Songs of the Tewa. New York, 1933.
fly out: J-P Sartre, "A Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology: Intentionality." Quoted in, S. Bakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe. New York, 2016.