the New Pantagruel

We Go Out Searching for Sermons in Stone

The slender branch lifts in the wind as the tour guide explains
at length what the world will teach. Turkeytail fungus won’t hurt
this dead tree or any other. See the bark-colored moth,

a wing missing. Notice the three-legged toad, the tracks
of deer and golf carts, the stump sprouts of the tulip poplar,
stubborn but doomed. A plant without a face is hard to name.

Tired of looking where I’m told, sick of explaining, I walk fast
and faster until the voices die away. Orange-cap mushroom
in a log gone to coarse dust. The ridge trail tips down

toward the promise of a view. More wind, traffic, three-note
birdsong almost in rhythm with my steps. When the trail ends
on a high knob I follow a deer path downhill, clamber

through deadfalls thinking of falling, dreaming of flight.
When the path dwindles I find a sitting log above
the dim valley, the noisy invisible road. Men and women

are hard at work while I loiter and wander and pity myself.
The grapevine goes up thirty feet before it touches wood,
and how did that happen? These slips of wild rose and poison ivy

could be grafted into any poem and take good hold and prosper,
green and noxious, not our friends. The world says many things,
most of them sad and hard. The world has lost many things

and they all will return, but not as what they were.
From here the trail goes to fantasy and nostalgia, nirvana
and Neil Young. The lesson for today duplicates and defies

the one for yesterday. The tourist train clanks up the valley
and the driver blasts the whistle. There is a way home
from anywhere, past the nurse log and the wolf tree,

over the deer droppings fresh and dried, under one deadfall
and through the next. The squaw root and Indian pipe suckle gently
from the beech roots, taking just enough for bloom and seed.

Advice for Walkers

Watch your step. You could fall any minute through
the hard skin of rock, the soft skin of dirt. You could find

yourself floating to an awkward reunion with the debris
you’ve been trailing behind you all these years.

Watch carefully. There are some who burn so bright
even a glance will leave you whirling. Watch the ground

at your feet and the last stretchy sky. There is much
in the mucky spring that you don’t want to bring home

on your shoes. No one knows where the miracle
will begin, or where the disaster will start. No one knows

the name of the beloved until it is spoken, perhaps gently
when asked how to say it, Maria, or Kaitlin, or Grace.

The earth is a mirror. The sky is a lens. The trees are an echo
of their own roots, of your own roots, your lost fathers

brooding on shades of black in the quiet caves, your mothers
counting the one breath they manage each month, praying

thank you, praying goodbye. Watch your step, not the women
who glow like stars and are just as much your business.

Consider the small brick porch where your son lost his balance
years ago, where he fell hard, dizzy with love and hunger.

When your eyes have drunk a million shots of splendor
and turned back for more, when your heart has packed

and hidden every wonder, every slender ankle, every head
of curling invitations to the wrong feast, when desire

elbows memory into the bushes and runs headlong downhill
smack into the creek, when the creek closes icy

and astonishing over you, all your clothes soaked and useless,
the last veils of your secrecy torn open like the car door

after the crash, when you clamber up dripping mud
and snowmelt and the most obstinate futility since

second grade, when you fumble at the bank, scrape knuckles
on the frozen roots, on the slabs of broken ice, oh my friend,

lift your dripping useful boot and press it to the ground,
press and push and even now the world will hold you up.

Note from the Week After Next

The dawn is gray now, night and day, and we are no more pleased than the roosters and the finches.

Their whistles and squawks annoyed us, especially when we had frittered the night away with bottles and companions, but now we have lost even the sad thrill of carousing while the honest folk drowse.

The solid citizens have started to show up at Wal*Mart at all hours, to fill their carts with lawn ornaments, wrapping paper, bottles of oil treatment. They haunt the laundromats, smoke in clumps on streetcorners, astonished by their own transgressions.

The songbirds, herons, and crows gather unevenly on the public lawns, exchanging conspiratorial chirps and flutters.

Before he disappeared, the secretary of hours insisted that the absence of both sun and darkness was neither unexpected nor cause for alarm. Given the vicious and barbaric nature of our enemies, he stated, the casualty level is tragic but within acceptable parameters. He pledged firm action, soon.

Rumors of crash programs–to adjust the rate of continental drift, to utilize vast engines to reshape certain orbits, to rekindle subtle stellar processes–spring up like mushrooms, and blacken just as fast.

Each time we assemble, at intervals ever more arbitrary, a few more are coughing quietly into white rags.