Arcadia

Lessons from the New England woods—

You are never alone, if beetles count; you are not the center of anything.

There is still senseless death in Eden, but it all returns to earth in the end.

Ants build colonies in amber beer bottles, and these become poems,

and eventually the poet is eaten by ants, and a tree grows in that place.

Once the red dust settles, the mind is still.

Owls are: omens of death in some cultures, of birth in others;

people's souls transmigrate into fungi if they should learn patience,

or gnats if impermanence escapes them.

Up close, you can see what hard lives the deer have had,

all ticks and scars. They bound away, and they are once more idyllic

silhouettes in the primordial dawn.

Out here, I am not sick in any way that matters;

everything that has breath in it still, is alive. Nothing is wasted.