I find myself thinking, what you would see is

more of everything else, but not the mountain.

“OF”: AN ASSAY

Its chain link can be delicate or massive. In the human realm, directional: though one thing also connects to another through “and,” this is not the same. Consider: “Science and elephants.” “The science of elephants.” “The elephants of science.” In nature, however, the preposition is bidirectional and equal. The tree that possesses the roots is not different from the root-possessed tree. The flashing red of the hummingbird’s crest is the bird; the crust of a bread loaf, the loaf. The interior nonexistent without the external, each part coequal. And so grief too becomes meaningless in that fortunate world.

“TO”: AN ASSAY

If drawn as a cartoon figure,

you would be leaning always forward, feet blurred

with the multiple lines that convey both momentum and hurry.

Your god is surely Hermes:

messenger, inventor,

who likes to watch the traveller passing the crossroads

in any direction.

Your nemesis? The calm existence of things as they are.

When I speak as here,

in the second person, you are quietly present.

You are present in presents as well, which are given to.

Being means and not end, you are mostly modest,

obedient as railroad track to what comes or does not.

Yet your work requires

both transience and transformation:

night changes to day, snow to rain, the shoulder of the living pig to meat.

When attached to verbs, you sometimes change them

to adjectives, adverbs, nouns,

a trick I imagine

would bring enormous pleasure,
were you capable of pleasure. You are not.

You live below the ground of humor, hubris, grievance, grief.

Whatever has been given you,

you carry, indifferent as a planet to your own fate.

Yet it is you,

polite retainer of time and place, who bring us to ours,

who do not leave the house of the body

from the moment of birth until your low-voiced murmur, “dust to dust.”

And so we say, “today,” “tomorrow.”

But from yesterday, like us, you have vanished.

“AND”: AN ASSAY

The strange wind pressed on everything at once—

A door blew open in one room, a vase fell in another.

In this not unlike the word “and”: omnipresent even unseen.

Before disappears.

After transforms into others.

“And”—that strong rock—stays standing.

Undevourable thus of connection. Even death spits it back.

STUDY OF MELON & INSECT

A small misshapen gourd rests on the whiteness.

Near it a beetle, one wing lifted slightly above the other.

No reason why these.

The painter could have practiced a twisted pine branch housing a heron.

He could have brushed the ten thousand fish as arhats at play.

The two have travelled the centuries together

like the two halves

of a long and unlikely marriage met on a park bench—

Six decades, and still I sometimes find him a stranger,

the old woman pretends to complain.

A MAN WALKS THROUGH HIS LIFE

A man walks through his life