​Outside it is drizzling, a kind of dirty
Drizzle, mixed with sleet, and still
It washes the lawn and the capital
But it chokes the sound of the whippoorwill.

Inside, you imagine the streets are flooded,
That the credit union has collapsed at last,
You fall back into a dream. You are struggling out
Of the sea, the light is unsurpassed,

But a wall of ocean, twenty feet tall,
Rises, and you slip down,
Down into the trough, and you wake
And set aside the eiderdown.

​The leaf absorbs light. Electrons
Shift and free oxygen.
The boy on the second floor wears dinosaur
Pajamas. Stars’ hydrogen

Creates streams of photons, they strike
The dinosaur fur, oxygen seeps
From the grass in the Faroe Islands.
The boy lies in bed and sleeps

And the dream spreads throughout the room.
The air rises over a hill,
Photons stream and flood the earth
And the leaves on the forest floor in Brazil

​It takes a lot of confidence
To build a house here on this scraggy hill,
A person’s got to look inside 
To drive away the subpolar chill.

The manx shearwaters ride the air,
Sometimes so high, swinging, black,
And here is this solid stone,
Grey seals, the wind in the cul-de-sac. 

​First, you have to decide: do you
Want to? You can always sing another
Note. This path climbs, you are
Committed. Father sun and mother

Moon, the lizards and the bats,
They each have their own way. Your way,
The mulberries and moss and a tortoise, the shadows
Bleached, and the breeze at midday.

​Fire creeping across brush, 
Foul air and dead trees,
The corpse of a deer and smoke, burnt
Air that scalds the breath. These 

Creatures, weren’t they innocent,
Even good? And all these creatures,
These blind moles, aren’t they yearning
For good, songbirds or screechers,

Their feet are trapped, they flap their wings
Until they might break, and they lie and wait
For liberty. You can feel the heavy
Air before a storm create

An expectation, hope, every
Flood that cuts between rocks,
The muffled lightning in the clouds,
A wind that sweeps the hill and fox,

A man walks with a walking stick,
A planet threatens to explode,
It is so hard not to live in the ravaged
City, but light the night-black road.

​We rise. Even the baby jumping 
Spider drinks its mother’s milk.
We dilate and expand, the overtones
Of the glass harmonica, the silk

Is strong, its sheen reflects many
Colors and we love everything,
And mostly every pure soul
Of the Faroe Islands or Ishpeming.

We love the love of truth, of good,
Kindness and the sheen of strands
Of silk, a slug of linotype,
A line of swelling ampersands.