The Government of Nature

To Those Who Would Awaken

63 To Those Who Would Awaken It will happen like this for many of you, the house suddenly too much, the garden so full you go out, maybe thinking of the way the earth gives under your feet, the water making circles around them if you have to cross a river, leaves and branches lift up and then brushing against you when you have crossed, these things or the very structure of things, the making of the hip joint, electrical plots in the heart, thalamus sending reminders to the moving, you looking up into the still wings of gliding crows on this day when you know in one second there is the power to give things new names, so you decide this is not leaving but returning, that ends are middles or that there are no points, no time, so by the time you are miles away from leaving it is only the eternal very first moment of anything, making a pound cake from scratch, moving your hand across the hem of a new skirt, the slight fear and tremble when a sudden sound hits your wall, like children throwing the ball against the fire escape until it rattles like an empty skeleton, the hot shower where you are alone until the memories step in with you, deep solitude of living alone, falling to where you are connected with everything, and it happens, the stepping out, mind full of seeing yourself move out into the world without difference so you can see every move you make is a change in the current, the arrangement of patterns under a brush, a twisted calligrapher’s stroke, all these things, walking while the bones of who you are become roots. ...