this, in my heart

Posted on | May 20, 2009 | 5 Comments

The birds don’t care about the stock market dips.
The weather is unknowing of the forecast: clouds,
even when there was call for sun.
Things keep right on brazenly living,
bursting, growing, with such a stark indifference
to the tumbling of our souls.

Some days we’re just on this earth.
Other, truer days, of it.

We have forgotten this.
How to speak with our hands
close to the ground, our fingers whispering with worms,
our hearts wild like the hearts of salmon spawning.
They swim upstream. They know how to leap,
and to leap again, upwards, improbably against the current
even as bears wait.

We are the only ones that are caught, feeling so much,
trying for so much, for flint against stone, for a spark,
or for a thousand bucks, for a cleft, a notch,
a hold on all that we cannot hold.
So much that on some days we’re deaf and busy in our little boxes,
and on others,
the song of the vireo is enough

and everything breaks open.

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