The last poem in this book is called "Mythos."
"When we returned home there was the body
of the Earth that greeted us, the air
thick with the scent of those dusty arid flanks,
the scent of the ashes in our own bones
flowering in the fronds of the juniper,
in the depths of the rabbit brush.
Coming back from the rush and road of concrete canyons,
the scent of exhaust and gasoline
rising from the sidewalks and the walls.
It was like flowering oneself in the cells of one's body
to breathe in nostrils flaring, mouth
inhaling the scent of the Earth and what grew upon it.
A body of infinite form, one limb curving into the other,
and the air like the breath transpiring
from its languid lips.
I felt like a child again, when driven out of the house
by sadness, the piercing cry of the metal larks
perched in their kingdoms of the air, spaced
along the crests of the telephone poles,
calling me farther and further into the distance.
I would fling myself upon the ground and lie upon the Earth.
My arms outspread as if crucified,
but I was not crucified.
I was one diving face downward into the earth,
feeling the pull upon my atoms and cells,
calling me back into the dust--
the same dust that the Milky Way scattered shimmering
open the sky at night.
The seeds of winnowing, the ashes of harvest.
As I lay there I was comforted.
The earth itself became my mother, and then by
turns a father, a friend, a lover,
and in each of those moments, as I lay upon the ground,
I held out my hands in a sign of great emptiness.
For I could not grasp or span that living form,
but could only float upon it, as the leaves of the water lilies
float on the surface of the water,
holding themselves millimeters above the rippling
and broad palms of green.
And in the infinite whispering, the click of crickets
caught in the grass, the shifting labor of the ants
I would hear not the ancient voice of some muttering God,
but the hum of the Earth itself."