We still carry those X and Y chromosomes

from the original Adam and Eve,
from fifty million years ago,

from African father and mother,
who, in the Upper Paleolithic, learned
to take those images of sky and water and herds of animals
and translate them into language—

how beautiful to speak the very trees, the spear
that pierced the antelope,

to sing the death of the creature
you would cook over flames

as over and over again
you spoke the magic word for fire.

Later came the words for life and death and God,
though those syllables lacked the perfect
resonance of pounding hooves or the hot, red glow
of branches rendered into smoke,

that was itself defined as an offering
to the flickering constellations.

Later you would shape sculptures of big-hipped women
from wet clay, and with your very hands
you would sketch into cave walls
the likenesses of deer and bison,

the images in your head spilling out
until the whole world
trembled with art, until vast civilizations

raised wheat and brewed beer,
built temples to new gods,
whom language had imbued with new
and terrible meanings.

Old humans, I praise thee!
We have moved so far from your language of the concrete and specific,
from words that equaled fire and hunger, that signaled
buffalo stampedes in the brain. These days
words merely symbolize our obsessions, in these last
days, these desperate days, these long days
spent at the outlet mall,
spent with our televisions, computers, and cell phones,
all of them speaking simultaneously,
all of them arguing consumption and selfishness,

language, language, language,
not like
buffalo, buffalo, buffalo…

for Campbell McGrath

The Coming Surrender

Jonathan Edwards proclaimed us
sinners in the hands of an angry god,
and, all these years later, that cosmic dread
reaches towards me, promises a strangling
damnation that is personal, all mine,
and forever-lasting.

Let me thank the Baptists again
for this late-blooming fury,
this Fear that haunts the night hours
like Florida moonflowers grazed by starlight, moistened
by mist that rolls in from the whispering sea.

Like moonflowers? Yes, like fragile petals
glazed with the coming surrender, the moment
of dissolution when white flesh falls to the hard ground,
when the moon parts the gathering cumuli

and all across this tropical world,
the late clouds thunder
their gospel of storm and trouble.

Heaven of Horses

I is
the center
of my consciousness,
a word I’ve been trying to spell for forty years,
consciousness that is, with its tricky consonants
and extra vowels. But if you lunge deep

below consciousness, you’ll find
that moon-lit place where the bears
are chowing down on your grandmother
while raccoons run laps around the track
where you trained in high school
beneath the light of a silvery moon.

Whoever named those ring-tailed varmints raccoons
was really thinking. Is it onomatopoeia
when the word sounds like the racket
furry creatures make
in the dark dumpsters of 4 a.m.?

Now, there’s another word I’m surprised
I can spell: onomatopoeia. Sounds like
an opium-induced sigh
from a poet dreaming of Mongolia
where warriors worshipped the sky
amid the music of houyhnhnms
from the green-frosted pastures.

God, consciousness, raccoons, onomatopoeia, Mongols, whinnying horses
kerplunk across my brain,

that citadel of the I,

the place from which my essential “me-ness”
rushes out to meet the incoming tide
of everything that is the other,
which is an entire universe,
which is the sky so many have worshipped,
dark and glowing
across nights filled with those heaving constellations,
which themselves are filled with stars
helping sailors plot their journeys
across mighty oceans, beneath
solar systems roiling in the cosmic,

where Walt Whitman dances on the head of a pin.

It is a testimony to the hugeness of Walt’s consciousness
that he takes the place of several angels, yes, he is the better
angel, holy messenger of the cosmic
who sang praises of the “I,” who celebrated
the solitary, who embraced the communal,
who sang the body electric, who mightily
inhaled the fragrance
of sweating humans and horses.

I must say that the sky is a thunder of horses
when the nimbi rock with afternoon storms,
when thunder rolls the once-solid world
into a more wary wakefulness of the heavy rain
still to come. I must say the night sky

is a heaven of horses, ghosting across
the milk and white of interstellar spaces,
those places the “I” is always longing for,
that consciousness gathered beyond the single, hopeful spirit.

I never said God was.
But I’ll never say God wasn’t,
that there wasn’t a moment of fiery creation
that spun out all that would become poets and horses
and moons and stars. I’ll never say God
isn’t, even provisionally in this short
time between breath and thought.