That sense of identity endure is something
that floats around a great deal with me.
But every once in a while, I feel so
stuffed with a kind of self-knowledge
that's incredibly anxious or uncomfortable.
This is a poem about that.
Self-knowledge is however often dependent upon the weather,
right?
This poem begins with the weather.
It's titled American Landscape with Clouds and a Zoo.
Was written in the Pacific Northwest
after something like literally 60 consecutive days of rain
when I was living up there in a writing residency.
The only important thing for you to know
just so you don't think about it is
that there's a zoo mentioned within the poem.
It's a mental zoo.
There are two animals that are brought up.
Only one of them is mentioned.
The second one is not, the wren.
The second one we don't talk about.
American Landscape with Clouds and a Zoo.
You can be walking along the beach of a quaint Northwest
and coastal town.
On the one hand, the Great Pacific Ocean
held placid restless and the sound
when it comes over like those immense wool and gray clouds
layer upon layer that pour from their Pacific
composure, suddenly troubled moving troubling roaring
easterly overhead for the inland.
America is in trouble.
And you're too fucked up to even understand it and buy it.
Is America fucked up because it understands itself
only too well as you do you?
Every time the girlfriend chucks you a lusciously coy smile,
your beside yourself like a sailboat.
And every time you think happiness is just like this
forever, you fooled like a kid.
America, I'm glad I'm hardly you.
I've got myself to think about.
In my zone is a fairly large zoo,
plenty of room to walk around shade,
and the shade that is increasingly bitterly
called shadow.
Of animals, they're a bit too, arranged
in unpredictable cadence and sequence.
One of the renowned leopard of the snow,
lazy, humorous, speckled pepper a bit
like the wren that flies from shadow to cage
to shade to shadow.
When I mistakenly awaken at night,
I dread both the darkness and the inevitable increasingly
querulous birdsong of the inevitable increasingly wide
stun of light.
Everything is too brief, eternal, stable, unpredictable.
Everything always says I'm all there is forever chum.
Just see it my way.
And I do Thanks.