After the Before

What was that peculiar expression
The sun had to say to the water?
"All the work that went into looking
After the gods"? The plaintive joy

Of being free from joy without
Complaining pervades my living days,
And I am on the lookout from the wall
For every happy moment that steals

Through the tangled woods that gather
In a long wave of helpers and pests
Trying to escape the necessary forest.
The Pine Barrens, my canoe

On a lake no more than a cranberry
Bog, the Barrens, birthplace
Of my grown soul, of my epiphanic
Loss of faith in faith, in turtles

All the way, each god greater
Than the other, trick of the brain,
That what is larger and more remote,
Say mountains viewed from wetlands,

Must grow simpler as it grows greater
And hazier with unreproachable
Unapproachability, the old answer
To complexity thus resolved

By an ever-receding story, never
Granting that complexity grew worse
As the distance grew greater, until,
Like Alps or Rockies imagined

From a quiet flatness in the pines,
The gods became both invisible
And plausible explanations for all these
Blooming, buzzing confusions, these Barrens

Are dying. The great storms from the sea,
The people pouring out of the towns,
Are nothings compared to the infrequency
Of bitter-cold winter nights anymore,

The occasional clarity that protected the trees
From hungry hunger beetles boring
Under their skins. My Barrens rust,
Darken, die from life. So it was real.