This poem is called Unto Ourselves.
And it's the last poem I'll read.
Unto Ourselves.
Even when we realized we'd stopped,
in every essential way stopped moving forward, when we came
to see, we were descending, even more tightly bound
to the vortex as images rushed by in front of us
and a blue whale rotted on the sand in Bolinas,
it stink drifting southward where dozens
of barnacled 40 foot grays, dead from starvation,
began to hulk against the shore, the white-tufted foreheads
of waves smashing against those nulls of oily decomposing
flesh, it was everywhere we looked if we cared to look.
Out over the bit-sized squares of cheese and Saintsbury wine
into the hum taking place under a covered moon,
or cared to listen to clumped wild-rye shushing the dunes
while pulverized rock shrieked along fault lines in decibels
so muted only the soles of our feet,
conducting the ground's sound up into our tali,
could register what was happening right there where
our lives had been cut off from themselves and become something
else drained of substance, steeped in the privilege
against which we protested with those we called our friends--
the ones who lately seemed to contract backward
from our greetings, giving us to suspect that they too
sensed something askew, the skip at the center of ourselves
or just an inkling of abyssal unhappiness was it?
Concentrated into the early evenings
like one of those spectral white fallow deer introduced
to the headlands that began to outcompete native species
and so, before they were slaughtered every one by
hired hunters, inciting arguments
about what was native if all systems are given to change.
Maybe our ear twitches.
Maybe the deer's ear twitches.
But we still can't quite make out
in the dimness, what we're looking at, can we?
Nor is there interim from the tumult
of incoming, the masticating chores, pind-pings begging
immediate response, the sheer overabundance
of the present shame which plugs up each minute
and stands in now for whatever it meant to live oneself
before every gesture became a performance for an audience we
imagine never to be finished with looking at us.
And as for the budding-out of being we'd called passion?
Or the sensual moments phrased into our gait
when we were coming to feel something, when
our shadows merged not as romance,
but the real consequence of our mutuality
with shadows of conifers along the steep ravine,
and completely naked and without relief the world past us
into the inhuman where rosette lichen surged across rocks
lacking nothing that might be needed
to answer for our existence?
By now, some of us, outmaneuvered by the economy
were lying around Dolores Park like fallen fruit
waiting to rot.
Others found themselves receptive
to a trivial, self-justifying kindness.
What with coral belching up its algae,
the constellations receding, the awakened tundra,
how could we bear, we wondered to each, other even the weight
of our own sorry initiatives?
Life, someone countered, is pure gratuitous magnitude.
Just look, the light is there, grace itself.
But it was already noon.
And as we looked, the colors of the hills
began to blanch, and all around us,
in the field of the visible, we sensed, without speaking,
duration's ebb.
Thank you.
[CLAPPING]