become names spelled and written.

I sleep, forget, remember, forget again, and ask:

What of it?

Don’t bother me, brother.

Don’t bother a dozing turtle

born to contemplate and yawn.

I was a scorpion and a tarantula

before the first huts of guadalajara,

before the first aztecs gathered bananas.

I was a maroon cockatoo and a green parakeet

before the first incas fashioned bird-cages.

In western nebraska I was a wild prairie pony

with a white forelock down my sorrel face

before ever a caesar or alexander or any czar

dreamed the smoke-shadow of a dream

of shattering armies beyond the horizon

and taking over.

What is this burden I carry out of yesterday?

Why am I so wise, so grand, so cunning, so ignorant?

What have I made that I haven’t broken?

What have I bred that I haven’t killed?

Why have I prized my skills as a killer?

What jargons, what gibberish, must I yet unlearn?

What are these bygones of dreams, moans, shadows?

Who are these people I come from who follow the ways

of long-gone time and long-gone fathers?

What are these bygones

sea-brought and land-locked?

For I am one and all of them:

they swarm in me with song, cry and murmur;

they fill my room with scurrying fish,

with apes and kangaroos, with swine and birds;

they bring arenas and theaters of action

wherein they kill, eat, crave, sing, live on,

or perish before the might of the stronger;

they stir with bleats and moans;

they fade with growls and chuckles.

They dream in me

and rise dripping on sea horizons

to shout hosannahs, to cry thanks,

to vanish leaving no sign nor track

on the silent lines of green mist.

The earth rocked me

in a cradle of winds.

The fog and the mud

clung as a wrap and home

of swaddling cloths.

And the sea sang bye-lo bye-lo

and the stars and the rains

brought changing songs: so-long so-long

joined to the sea’s old bye-lo bye-lo.

* * *

Deep roots moving in lush soil to send a silver-gray beech tree straight toward the sky—

Shallow roots in barren land sending their stalks of grass and weeds up over to bend in the wind with whisper tones—

Tangled and winding roots in desert wastes rising into cactus and the joshua tree to bring a hush on the air with spare and murmuring blossoms wrought from dews of night air—

Am I, are you, kin to these everliving roots? Have you, have I, one time long ago been an oak with a wind song in our leaves?

Have the bones of your torso spoken low to a sugar maple in October flaming in branch and leaf: “We can not be strangers, I know how you are what you are in root and trunk.”

* * *

I have said to the elephant and the flea, “Each of us makes his life in what to him is the Known and for each of us there is a vast Unknown and farther beyond the vaster Unknowable—and the Ignorance we share and share alike is immeasurable.”