learning

Evidence covered with a carpet of grass,

Network drawing slowly without ever

Taking away, dark and scattered home

In the corner of your arms, whenever

I visit, kiss your eyes

Perhaps the old maple from my childhood spoiled

Me for human love, that

Ebbs and flows, responds thunderously,
That expects

And needs.

It is not pretty, this view of me

From high in the bows.

We get stuck wanting to only grow.

Today is a cold sun

And warm wind, flags

Waving their arms planted over tombs

Of men infrequently remembered. they

Enlisted young

And it does not matter much what they did

To their descendants.

We who examine every project

Like the foreign thrum of an unseen beetle

Could never be so brave nor so young

Nor dead in quite the same way, though all

Things are not in exactly the same way.

I remember vaguely:

10 or 11 i took off

My shoes and wandered

Over hot pavement,

Mica shining

Like stars, until

Reaching a cool

Hill covered in mossy

Grasses, leaves all

About. I was late and

Could hear the dinner bell

But reached out a hand

To a knot of roots

Standing upright,

A thick rope of

Coils arising from all

Across the cemetery

It seemed, like many

Tongues of a fire,

And i looked

Up--

We have seen many

Restarts together, as the moon,

And a job, a love, a home,

A friend disappear, through it all

All hurt and poison,

All shimmering heat and flood, all

Pleasant and simple days, we take

Slowly what we can hold,

What we can use, and we

Incorporate what lives into our life.

Make a crown.

Then we incorporate what is gone but still lives.

Curl around it like a wound

until we do not.

Old friend, how do we accept Jung’s turning,

That we will never be

Any taller and i wonder

What are you drinking now

From beneath my feet?