sloshed in the sludge of the sea

and I have clung with a shell over me

waiting a tide to bring me breakfast.

I have been the little fish eaten by the big one

and I have been the big fish

taking ten lesser fish in one fast gulp.

I have been a shrimp, one of a billion,

fed to a million little fish

ending as fodder in the bellies of big fish.

In the seven seas

of the one vast glumbering sea over the globe

I have been eater and eaten,

toiler and hanger-on.

I lived half in the sea, half on land,

swimmer and crawler, fins and legs.

I traveled with layers of earthworms

grinding limestone into loam.

Encased as a snail

I wrought one pure spiral,

an image of no beginning, no end.

“This is the image wherein I live;

the outer form of me to be here

when the dried inner one drifts

away into thin air.”

I have journeyed

for sticks and mud and weaving thongs

to build me a home in a bush.

I have mounted into the blue sky

with a mate lark on a summer morning,

dropping into sycamore branches to warble.

The orioles called me one of theirs;

herons taught me to stand and wait in marsh grass,

to preen my wings and rise with legs bundled behind.

I was the awkward pelican

flying low along the florida coast with a baby.

I stood with pink flamingoes

in long lagoons at tallahassee watching sunrise.

I am black as a crow with a caw-caw in my throat

and I am lush with morning calls of catbird and mocker,

the cardinal’s what-cheer what-cheer

and the redbird’s whistle across hemlock timbers

in early april in wisconsin.

I have done the cleansing service

of scavengers on land and sea;

the red and sea-green lobsters told me

how they win a living.

I have slunk among buzzards and broken hunger

with a beak in a rottening horse.

I have fed where my greatgrandfathers fed.

I know the faint half-words

of the fly and the flea,

the midge, the mosquito.

I was kin of a vampire

doing what a blind thirst told me.

A louse seeking red blood told me

I carry feeders in blood.

I ganged up with maggots

and cleaned a cadaver

and left the bones gleaming.

I am a grasshopper taking in one jump

a hundred grasshopper lengths.

I buzz with earnest bees

in the lingering sun of apple orchards.

I loiter with tumble bugs

seeming to know solemn causes.

I climb with spiders, throw ladders, nets,

frameworks out of my navel coils.

I am the building ant

of architectonic galleries and chambers.

I am egg, cocoon and moth.

I count my caterpillar rings of black and yellow.

I inch with the inch worms

measuring pearl-green miles of summer months.

I have swept in the ashen paths of weevils,

borers, chinch bugs eating their way.

Born once as a late morning child

I died of old age before noon.