​The water trickling down the mountain
Meets the river that is tumbling,
A heavy rain lashes the trees,
A comet melts, its incandescence crumbling,

For a moment, a lightning bolt thick
As a sequoia tree burst 
The earth, burst the cave where
A mother sat, her baby nursed,

And constellations sent their stars
Streaming. The boulders jittered
To the trembling of the man,
The ferns shook, the redstarts chittered,

A season later, wild wheat was green,
Maize, chokecherries, wild plums,
Children dived in the river, some
Stayed on the shore and tapped the drums.

​We must consider the worth of a thought,
A moon beneath the rings of Saturn,
A plasma looping of the sun,
Colors of the primal pattern,

Pillars of light, green curtains,
Dances with Japanese fans,
A sky of fireflies, a mind
Of architecture, lines and plans,

The dancers shuffle from the stage,
The mechanical traffic light
In the village at midnight turns red, turns green, 
The fireflies are out of sight,

The force to infuse the air,
The trees, the street, the balconies,
To electrify, to fill the skin
With the tapping of timpanies

But how shameful the air when
The broad wind scuttles, chopped
By wind farms, finds itself lost
On Second Avenue. The dropped

Note papers rise, a person reads:
“These seat belts are too tight,
There are too many traffic lights,
This is the dawning of the satellite,

“Woe, he who tells the wood, 
Awaken! Arise, you mute stone.
Will it teach? It is overlaid
In gold and silver, of its own,

“It has no breath.” But then
The cyclone churns, the solar storm,
The stinging gamma rays, the breached
Van Allen belt, the raging swarm

Of cosmic rays, the thoughts that spin
Apart, that end up on an exoplanet,
Stranded on an asteroid, burning
In a comet’s hair. The granite

Of Bear Mountain bears the soil,
The crowberries, the dragonflies
That zip their invisible lines of prose
To swirl to hover in the skies.

​It is an advanced sense, perhaps
Tracking magnetic lines, or 
Electricity, or some kind of
Invisible light. And more,

Those creatures who sense that light
Find goodness in the world, in 
Its forests, in its cliffs, even
The virus that plagues the puffin,

A generous light expands, one-celled
Creatures twitch, the viruses fail,
Henri Rousseau and van Gogh watch,
Innocent strangers step out of jail,

And beyond all that, the knowing
Envelops the world, and its trees
And antelopes, are synapses,
And they crackle along the breeze. 

​The dragonfly glows. He embodies
The best of the world, the best
Of being alive. That metallic glow,
Green or blue, does not rest,

It is a beauty that shines
Through the exoskeleton,
An awesome flame that sates
The splendor of the inner sun.

No one can tell it where
To shine, no thought can grasp,
No desire define, no choice confine,
The infinite rightness that no one can clasp,

A beauty that gives the pond
And papyrus life, until it feels
The lines of the universe,until
It justifies the wasps and eels,

Even the snapping turtle and
The dung beetle, even they
Are bright, the sun is shining,
A beetle trundles on a stray

Leaf that floats across 
The stream, the dragonfly darts,
Is still, its eyes see all,
The sun ascends, morning starts.

​In the dark, the quiet, the cold,
Beneath the crushing weight of
Gelid sea, here are the frilled shark,
The vampire squid, no love

But ruthlessness, not yet even
Fear. The core of fear, coiled
Within the giant spider crab,
The goblin shark, the water roiled,

From this emerge the sea kelp forests,
The seiners, the longliners,
A floating restaurant, a salt wet wind,
An engine purr, the murmur of diners,

Two billion miles away, Miranda
Circles Uranus. There may or may not
Be music, but there is methane and
Helium, Miranda is torn and wrought,

And from the cold, or from
The searing heat of coils of stray
Solar flares ride traces of amino acids, 
Scraps of molecules, coils of DNA.

​A lone planet, undisturbed by other 
Planets, a traveler in the Mariana
Trench, it has its own life, it
Wears its own traveler’s bandanna,

Sending out magnetic waves, ripples
In the sandy black, touches of
Wisdom, understanding, blendings
Spinning, majesty and love,

Here is a wellspring of ammonia, iridescent
In the sight of an alien eye,
The volcanic rift, the giant tube worm,
A deep, dust-shedding Mt. Sinai,

Their motes, their bubbles, panspermia,
Rise to the iridescence of glaze,
Pale-yellow gilt along the edged trees,
Asteroids sprinkling the Dog Star blaze.

​All of the breaths are organized,
Hexagons, sunlight through the trees,
Trails traces brambles, snails,
Numbers stacked by Ptolemys,

A flywheel, a neuron, the sense
Of heat, the volcano that ripped
Off the head of the mountain warms
The ground that had been stripped,

Marchers, tribes, tumbling
Chronologies, species and planets, when
One sun flames, one nest glows,
One sorrel whose leaves open in the glen,

Dewberries, sweet and royal,
The trailing leaves that take root
In the soil, the hermit thrush calls
With the shrill of the flute. 

​The frog egg and sperm float
Down the stream. The earth reflects
Green light to the sun, the moon,
Photon to photon, the light connects,

The dinosaur, the bear dog, the
Goblin shark, the monkey puzzle tree,
The chloroplast, the mitochondria,
The baleen whale, the hijiki,

The stamen, the pistil, the
Mango and the cockatoo,
The river reflects the sky,
And the sky is sapphire blue.

​Here is an infinite mechanism—or
Organism. Or lens. Or sidewalk.
Or skywriting. Or eye. Or scribbled
Shadow of a red-tailed hawk.

It is a seal pressed into you,
It is your steering wheel, it 
Is the barque on your canals,
Beneath teh bridge, the soil, starlit.

It is the sky and earth, it is
The slanting rain, the dew. It
Is the word, the wordless curlew,
The curve, the arch, the dragonfly, the grit.

And we are pressed for time, thin
As a scraped dime, so we forget
From time to time, a letter of
The alphabet, the aura of regret.

In the DNA strands of the galaxies
Lines of life glow. And whoever gazes
At the dew-glistening web feeds
His neurons, and through multiple phases

The greater him, of which he is
A limb, panspermia, a flood
Races through alleys of the skies
Gases green and pink and rosebud

Spreading to the island universes,
Strings trembling songs from where
There are no rules, no lack of rules,
A glistening that fills the air.

The Unknown sees the streaming of
The known. The weaver of the light
Of variable and compact stars
Shows the Source of space the flight,

The shape of sparrows and asteroids,
These lights appear in the sky and whiz
Upon the streets of the metropolis,
And all the mountains and the plains are his.