“Remains of Stand in the Air”
Won’t you stand with me in the center of the compass
where directions intersect
and every action begins?
Isn’t this where fir trees stand
with applications of force panthered and green-peaked,
combing through the air, up-birded
with newborn nakedness
pulling off extemporaneous onerous feats of persuasion
not only on the nostalgia-drenched professions
from before the one sun stopped being
a father for the lumberjack boys taking aim
on the rudimentary pacifist choirs
of giant native firs?
Back in my leaves, the birds land
on branches of the genome, where they’ll sing in the morning
with her crimson center
open to the next person
through towering stretches
as, yes, she’s growing older
but far younger than the sky
deepening blue closer and further than evening
where the Pacific Coast fir needles have been licks
of solar plasma in pulses that break
through luminous sea fog thickening
with heaviness of the minutes
of wood, pungent sharpening starlight
where pinecones glow and the mind peaks.
“Remains of Being Awake”
Since what you’re thinking comes from you
and someplace other that reaches you in time
therefore, what you’re thinking is yours
and yet not yours, with wind-slid
Arabic numerals off the sky charts
indicating galaxies on all sides
of fairly uncertain consequences
arranging nevertheless for a necklace
to be worn around beauty
of the original forests
where intelligence has been
honest as the next ethics still emerging
around blank-slate
requests for sudden reassurance.
As maps exist in the inherited speech of your father
and mother, it’s good to listen, to rule out
false assumptions placed on the steel tables
first merging lost and required attempts
to breathe all at once around
spiral towers elevated mystically electric
with mushrooming past felt foundational kinesis
as reconstructs the fall forestry of courage with surges
in procreative safe passage more integrated
the more we’re able to hoist propellers
from the old volumes into winds,
from the invisible to the seen.