Education
geode
(song)
now
is the heat of the day
now is the heat of the day
where is the garden the garden of my lord
where he walked in the cool
of the day
Earthwards
the early earth was silent
like a mind spinning
to recall a word a word
it lacks the frequencies to hear
for every articulation, renunciation
for every erection, burial
stones cast
into the crucible of compression
then the slow uplift
of syllables
jasper, quartz, obsidian
speaking of earth
Exhibit 1
Start with a base map, unlabeled terrain
in shaded green and ochre, nude relief,
cool continental mass bathing in blue,
a face whose features now are visible,
unannotated, apolitical,
as if a mighty snow had settled here
and muffled every static line and letter,
earth as naked as the moon, but full
of lively color from the fissured west
into the placid belly of the country,
eastward over quartzite ridge, carbonate
valley into southwest-trending s-curves
up the coast, a range two thousand miles,
two hundred fifty million years of mountain
formed in three successive waves of rock
uplifted and depressed, and in the west
it’s just begun. Six billion acres
under time, under stress and stretches
of content. Reserved for a duration.
Blue-green grid of constant revolution.
Exhibit 2
The centrifugal force of a room:
four walls, a ceiling.
Nothing can get in
but what you admit.
Part dark harbor,
part isolation chamber.
A man who’d lived out of doors
said what he’d missed most
was not a roof, not a lock,
but a doorknob.
Exhibit 3
To surprise in silence
in midwinter
as the morning
sun singles out
and burnishes the highest
branches of a pine
°
to find inside
a golden chip of spine,
a broken bit of brackish
rattlesnake: scores of
tiny whelk, sharpened, bleached
and stillborn pencil tips
°
to cast knee-deep
