Redwood
— for Anne Waldman
Now that the universes keep expanding
and can be viewed more psychedelically
through the Webb scope;
I return to
not a nothing from nothing
infinite birth, or big bang, but
a redwood
reclining, upended for a moment,
teaching me, common house-ant,
starting from its root ball,
broad as a few solar systems,
crawling the micro-hairs’ winding path,
making assignments
up on to the main trunk
and in ten million or so years
I might reach a tablet
inscribed with the poems of Enheduana;
and in another stretch
a bark-cliff-edge leading inside the mind
of Dante. All while I watch
for companions, or wonder
what they’re up to—
— that knot is my childhood village’s
mysterious people, their talk and backstories;
— these cracks in the bark are channels
to the sky;
—the needles bring the dead through
electronics, this I know
and think of all the years I’ve been reading
you, dear Anne on your birthday,
reading you as I’ve always done, one book
at a time, keeping it in my bag for
weeks, often when traveling:
solitary transport
reading, re-reading, knowing
there’s more, of Iovis, or
Marriage, Manatee, Bard, or Insta’s
Fast Speaker Music. Singing,
I court the ant:
This is your brain/This is your brain on drugs/
and charting the age of a
universe is like
reading for pleasure
and wisdom, simultaneously.
Traveling the redwood
I recall an afternoon we took
a drive, I, mapless, looking
for a yarn shop specializing in worsted
sheep’s wool fresh from the hands
of the Winooski spinner. You were
excited with a new project, and somber
about the Archive, then we sopped
to look at a brook saturating
the road and stepped, happy into our
splendid concentrations.