Making Ready

   Granite Point / early autumn

     One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness,
        one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole.
          —Nietzsche


this wild frenzy this
monstrous energy

a large egret and a small one
swell-riding two adjacent logs
poised everlasting egret-like

splitting the stone of my heart

a seal peers also among the kelp

the tides are too high to enter
the consolation of cave right now
so from the Carmelo ledge
i dip my hands into the salt water
and drink up

that deed is everything to me

between the lava flows
of a hundred million years
ago all the scales of magnitude
are collapsing this noon

my chest falls breathing out

waves crash into foaming
white aquamarine fractals

below the crystalline faces
crumbled as if yesterday
in the freshness of decomposing
Santa Lucia granodiorite

thus comes renewal of my most inward
sincerity on the verge of global alarms

great dread

with sweet anxieties of the heaviest nature
the most lost

giving style to my character

i would rather dance free together
than die together

this is a proper day

crimson-fronted parakeets
are colorizing Seattle i read

much welcomed much needed

(a murder of crows sent me out
at dawn heading this way)

i just sighted a pelican juvenile

for the first time in my life

the birds would bring us Salvation
i think as the world has never known
the likes

a great moulting

watching carefully
a huge hawk on the fence

i heard two owls conversing last night
truly i have never heard that

the winter storm approaching perhaps
or a last resort

as i myself aspire as never before
to make ready to become

a creature altogether more flexible

i am already crossing

   October 2004