Poet's Obligation (after Pablo Neruda)
To you who won’t Indian meditate beside the Stuck
River this Monday morning, or may be expanding
vistas of patience in some new Abu Ghraib,
patriotic affair, this missive arrives sourced
in a deep part of yourself speaks to your ear
silent as if something essential you’ve long denied.
This impulse we share, can be experienced
as an urge, a feeling, a feel’d, not unlike the starling
flock swirls against gray of skyscrapers. Disappears.
Consistent with the urge to realign
with ancient constellations.
So, impelled by an urge I can’t quite understand
but train myself to trust, I return to the Stuck
in this time of whole-systems transition, notice
for you madrone blossoms, lilac, nootka rose, glacier
fed river roar over boulders sent centuries ago,
seek to pacify the inner urge to solve via violencia.
Send offerings of tobacco watch for you
their effort to bring news downstream
to antepasados as they reach the sea and time
bends to announce their arrival, a butterfly
effect’s engaged & we learn the huge power
of
that which can’t be seen. The inner
Borealis of green awakens. You think this is me
but’s only the shooting star which got us here.
12:07P – 5.19.08