But to live digging deep

is to feel the blood

in you rage as rivers,

I’m looking for that moment’s stillness where everything becomes crystal clear and you see yourself as from a distant hill or a star, everything in perspective

The Wild will call you back.
She will hang you upside down 
and shake the nonsense 
from the pockets 
of your mind.

Because the great poems are about you and me both
And there is damned little we will be able to discuss
In the normal flow of the river

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,

Today I learned that trees can’t sleep
with our lights on. They they knit

a forest in their language, their feelings.
This is not a metaphor.

There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes . . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping of blood

A whole day without speaking,
rain, then sun, then rain again,
a few plants in the ground,

There is a trough in waves,

A low spot

Where horizon disappears

And only sky

And water

Are our company.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

That it slows you down
so you can hear the stream as it pours

It reminds you
you are in the body it made for you

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates

Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses,

to our selves. It locates us. Without that return

we can go so far away from our true natures

The first thing we have to do
is to notice
that we’ve loaded down this camel
with so much baggage

I was welcomed here—clear gold
of late summer, of opening autumn, 
the dawn eagle sunning himself on the highest tree, 

You, sent out beyond your recall
go to the limits of your longing

And if it’s true we are alone,
we are alone together,
the way blades of grass
are alone, but exist as a field.

More important than what was recorded, these evenings
deepened my life: they framed every event

Side by side on a log by the bay. Sunlight. Unleashed dogs, prancing through surf, almost exploding out of their skins with perfect happiness. Dogs who don't know about fired park rangers, or canceled health research, or tariff wars,

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.