Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008

The Tree

170 f r o m g o u r d s e e d t h e t r e e I am taking a walk on a cool, April morning through the cemetery under the homemade archway gate. The strength of the ants is pouring up from under a slab, collapsing the edges of a tireprint. A singeing groundfire has been here. Someone has lined up four seashells on one grave, conch shells, saved from the ocean, placed as if listening to the ground like the saying, Keep an ear to the ground. I empty one by shaking and turning it to loosen the spiral of dirt and sand. I put my ear to its ear, this valve for the ocean. In the almost total quiet I am wandering between the dead and the dreamed, listening to a shell. A slowmotion rainstorm out on the ocean at night blends and spends itself. One love is that restful mixing of freshwater and saltwater, the great transparencies inside each other. • • • 171 f r o m g o u r d s e e d Another love is work the same as ants do, busy in the roots of a live tree. It hurts to look at them, eating the mind and the imagination, always at it. Put your hands in the empty places. Feel the ants along your arms. Do the way the Ecuadorians weave Panama hats, without looking, their arms underwater. What is it we make here with the ants in the subterranean wetness and freshness? New hats, strong black hats, composed of dirt and woven with roothairs, a nest hat for each of us. How is it so late? It’s almost noon, and I’m walking around in a daze. Do you feel the ants along your arms? People jealous and irritated with each other for not giving enough time, people trying to find something they want to do this morning. Listen to yourself saying, Do what you feel like you have to. I don’t care. • • • 172 f r o m g o u r d s e e d We are dizzy and sick with such carelessness. Once I was being chased in a dream. I hid in a woodshed, where there was a mother goat. They looked in. I lay down and shut my eyes and sucked milk from the goat’s nipples. The villains were so startled they didn’t recognize me. I lay down and sucked milk from a nipple. I wish I did lie down like that and get up without dropping a sip, without missing a note or a leaf. Last summer a man said to me, You can’t see it, but there is a tree, long branches reaching out. The roots are in the ocean of the mind. The tips are actual stars. My children imagine how it might be to swim in various substances: think of motor oil. Think of a swimming pool full of mercury. • • • 173 f r o m g o u r d s e e d Think of swimming in the milk of a spirit tree: a cloud where distance blends in the idea of distance, light mixes with thinking of light, burning, with love for the sun. Graves, the singed pattern on the ground, a seashell, the ants, air in a moving tree. Loud and soft voices lift and leave a room, humming with themselves outdoors. Two people with the lantern off sit just a few feet apart, talking. There’s a slight wind. ...