Hither Come Hither

Still turnstiles framed by a window           the red alders of Willapa Bay

                    [              Then, a red squirrel,
                                   my notation of it
                                   as if it were an upheaval
                                   in daily drifting—                    ]

the limbs dangled their catkins       as I upswung to them from within

                      [          A history
                                 of a wet afterbirth
                                 and held in the arms of my mother       ovate
                                 my notation of it         formative for me—                ]

             The signal from branches      in bright green coats, loud                                       in the vivified hollow of the swale       in a site
      of gladness (as this gaze would have had it) morning becoming excessively noon
                 the gladness
as I waded through it   bathing in forest         shinrin-yoku
                                                                                                      in Arashiyama

with her      in twenty-first century style
and in other such claims of the bourgeois traveler

                            [     Why will I not name her    why will I not speak                                              to her?       I want to spare her     no

                                   I want to feel I spared her this historicity

                                   and if I explain the gladness    I will harvest it
                                   the new sustainability—                                            ]

also          the throngs of phones in front of tourist faces

                            [        Sudden emergency warble in the alder—     ]

                            [        Then, a robin panned

                                      into the plane of glass
                                      (my relentless notation of it)
                                      flailed off and submerged into the alder
                                                                                               saplings—  ]

                          [        Then I shocked to a finchsong—          ]

                 And I was back to Blake (safe ground) from a near-linnet’s

                 song ripped from itself into this alien, human, distanced, 

                 tribal ritual, to convey it or to channel it      vatic

           The composer near me said there were three forms of listening: the sensuous plane, the expressive plane, and the sheerly musical plane, but we preferred it scaled into the diatonic

with no chromatic alterations

so that much was missed

          Blake said I’ll drink of the clear stream—he would not sing—

       and this was the grief: the fish of the sighers’      stream were fish
caught within a thimble-sized drinking glass
                                                                                                         dumb fancies

Or was it the decomposing fish of Agassiz, finally described?

                        [       Then a green humming bird floated before me
                                 my notation of it—                                                       ]  

                        [       What is this false history?     what I
                                 is this false history?—                                 ]

My alder leaves are serrated   and here comes meta phor
 

                                              my use of the window as a frame
                                                                 
                                               my subjectivity
                              spored into the air between our limbs
                                 lodging into evergreen porousness

                               swelling through the rains into a soft                                                                             blanketing moss-future

We want time to have happened before we did
but not after we did
the forest was here for us to arrive within
                                                                    [we paid our admission
                                                                    we paid to feed the deer     ]

               The red alders on the edge of the continent will hear 

                the shallow breath outside the mouth of the creation

                without us, a bombast torn into the plane of silence

                     as the shelf slips at last into eustatic Pacific

                we distance ourselves from our bodies

                these storehouses of bloodless meat erected on feet 

                and whatever is made made of alder is alder

                                                                                      Yes now unlatch
                                                                                      the lock
                                                                                          from this gland
                                                                                      morning’s sap
                                                                                          into an instant
                                                                                      amber
                                                                                          thought leaked
                                                                                          onto the lichen
                                                                                            bole
                                                                                      hatched through
                                                                                            the window