for those who know they thirst

You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

So many are alive who don’t seem to care.
Casual, easy, they move in the world
as though untouched.

But you take pleasure in the faces
of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.

You are not dead yet, it’s not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.

on moving south

Hiking today a companion pointed out a rubber tree
and I thought, so this was a reason King Leopold raped the Congo.
Very good resource, he told me, but look at the roots--
this one is only ten or twelve years old, but the roots grow fast,
go anywhere for water. They push through pipes, burst through walls,
destroy things.

I looked down at all the roots,
spreading circumferences I couldn´t see
random roots showing here and there,
roots I´ve never noticed before,
roots connected to trees,
roots under all things and in everything.

Life, I am learning, is roots,
is what you are rooted in, is who you are growing into
is how desperate you are for water.

The adjustments between my Northwest woods and mountain village Honduran life so far are extreme, nearly impossible to articulate, rich as the plantains and beans we daily consume. The strongest and oldest oak roots, I read, are gnarled, twisted, deep, forced to cling to storm-beaten hillsides, made strong by all the earth pours out.

But when I lean over the chasm of myself,
it seems my G-d is dark, and like a web:
a hundred roots, silently drinking.
This is the ferment I grow out of.
More I don´t know.

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me-- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house--, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, seperate, in the evening...