you gotta love it. Especially if you’re selling

indulgences at the concession stand.

But knowing the steps to the dance

is not the same as dancing,

where getting lost in the music means

feeling your feet on the earth

and your body part of the landscape

that joins the movie to actual movement

by crossing the Bridge of Dreams

spanning the real roar and swirl of the unnameable river

whose water is everywhere it is writ upon.

Don’t matter, Jack, if you don’t give a shit

what the dance means

or even if you can hear the music

or see the screen.

You can’t escape the light, sound, action:

they’re as much a fact as photons or amino acid strings,

as real as wave or stone, wind and wheat.

We live inside the music and the light,

dance even while sitting still,

another shiver spun off the drum skin,

another whirl in the whirling.

So dive right in, understanding

that you live by life,

live inside the wave, inside the light,

and all you truly have to do

is what you believe is right.

PART THREE: HOLY SHIT

The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

–KEN KESEY

I believe in the scarlet archangels

hurled from the star-birth infernos

coalescing in collapsing space:

I believe in their swords of light.

I believe in the windstorm that ripped

the top off the sugar pine snag

and blew it eighty yards out on the pond.

I believe in the four-year-old furiously pedaling

his tricycle,

the eleven-year-old barrel racer, ponytail flying,

the dust of moments blown through our bodies,

syncopation of blood and breath.

I believe in everything and nothing at once,

the life roaring through us

like water cascading down stone palisades

into a bottomless alpine lake.

I believe the stories

of those who’ve danced on the roof of oblivion,

those who’ve smeared their bodies

with ashes and apricot blossoms

and went dreaming among the waves,

those who laugh, who scream, who never speak–

I believe you.

I believe in the power, point, and absolute purpose

of a pod of killer whales ramming

a yearling grey whale

to death in the Chukchi Sea.

I believe in the osprey fledgling crunched in a

wolverine’s jaw,

in the mother’s talons slashing its flesh,

in the wolverine’s blood twisting down the

sun-bleached snag,

in egg and empty nest.

I believe the spine-shot deer baa-ing like a lamb;

the shrill, frenzied, mortal shriek of the young raccoon

as the dogs overwhelmed her and tore her to pieces

on the frost-glittered banks of Redwood Creek;

the grey squirrel’s eerie, almost electronic chirp–

a sound like a flat rock skittering across a frozen pond–

as I carried his broken body off the road.

I believe the muffled blast of the .410 shotgun

after Billy Reeder held his breath for what seemed forever

and then with an utterly forsaken cry