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You are far away and invisible too, as is the wind, though it is close, making itself
And others feel a sudden shudder of excitement at being alive
Known by moving lines that are the branches of the visible trees.

Cactus sensibilities searing hellfire balloons
Celebrate drought life that humans fear
Paying homage to tension and attention at once.

Lizards levitate, newts secrete, salamanders serve as exemplars
Of cold-blooded stoicism, icy endurance, and a dim view
Of soil citizenship shared with spineless worms

Whipped along by life's demands into a deeper layer of the earth
Which they aerate, fecundate, and churn like clouds raising roots to the wind,
Or as cheerfully perceive as no layer at all.

But as odor and abstract (invisible) color, theirs, a whole world
Awaits them at the other side of the worm hole
Lacking perspective, they burrow through directional hollows

Not knowing how to navigate through this new parallel,
Stretching without human meaning under a human's meaningful garden
Universe in which everything seems a little different and yet the same

As it might have been before the surrounding buildings rose
Their pink stucco the color of a rose
To hide the horizon and make the distance invisible.

Invisible distance becomes a matter of imagination
Extended by memory, itself extending over facts, casting images into
Imagination—a function of consciousness, what Bergson calls the “fabulation function.”

Though it's not the function of animals to speak
When they speak, we must listen to what
They do so sometimes as we read or sleep

Dogs will sleep anywhere, sometimes circling
Around and around before falling down to sleep.

 

 

n e x t

 

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