Peach Blossom Spring

I

A fly, a dog, a breeze in the straw
That used to be green lawn

A bird, a chime, a lonesome pause
On the bare porch of what was

A beer, a book, a folding chair
Beside the sagging wooden stairs

Warped in all weather, wet and fair
To measure time from here to there

A wind that blows and goes again
A truck that roars around a bend

Of the long, dirt roads 
That map the bottom
Of this valley of homes 
Mostly emptied of those 
That bought them

II

A year ago,
This guy I know
Claims he wrote
A poem

About the delights
And tricky life
Of the mind
Viewed in its own light.

A year ago,
He addressed the poem
To a three-month old,
As if to show

He wasn't just caught
In his own thoughts,
Self-centered and distraught,
When he ought

To be thinking of others--
His wife, his daughter,
His by-then mindless mother,
His long-lost sisters and brothers.

I think he was wrong.
He knew all along
His own mind belonged
To the worlds of the gone

And therefore always near,
Not the world that appears
To be here,
However unclear.

Who can forgive
The mind's urge to relive
What cannot be sieved
For good and all from it?

Philosophy was so
Last year, so long ago.
The three-month old
Ephebe has grown,

Now a fifteen-month old child,
Who lisps in accents  mild
And acts a little more wild
When she most sweetly smiles.

III

We almost forget
Before we remember
When we're telling stories

To ourselves
To make others remember
That the core

Of our creation
Remains a kind of division
Between water, air, and fear

The creatures of the water
Swam first
And will last longer

But are not us nor ours
To fiddle with, no matter
How we devour them

And the creatures of fear
Are not ours either
But are us exactly, in our fevers

While the creatures that please,
Stay strange, let us breathe
Are the trees

They anchored the garden
They served as God's wardens
We can't live without them

And yet they stay rooted, apart,
Lives far from ours, weird, dark
Innumerable, vulnerable from the start

Humbaba's children, children's homes
Bones of our dreams, dreams of our bones 
Yggdrasil, mind, what we were once we're grown