We skipped a poem, so we're going
to go back a couple of months.
There's one detail, this in contrast
is a very quiet, non fearful poem.
But it will have a very quiet, anxiety producing effect on you
when I give you this detail if you don't know it.
There's a detail: 25 billion beats to each heart.
That's the best each heart can do.
And our lifespan is determined by the way we spend them.
So a shrew at 700 beats per minute, you can guess,
has a much shorter life than a whale at 15.
Think about this, just count.
Just count.
Reading this very quiet poem.
"Approaching August."
"Approaching August night takes on its own elegance.
The catenary curve of snakes, the breathing pentagonal
shaped flowers, the shadblow pliant and black with berries.
Orion rises in the east over fat green gardens,
and all meanness is forgiven.
We can view the river in the amethyst hour before dark.
25 billion beats to each heart.
Two passengers fish, two paddle, past the chalk caves,
the banks of aster, the flood plains
dense with white tail and beaver.
We're lost near midnight, a moonless summer evening,
mid-season in our senses, midlife.
The sky overhead like glitter ice, the water
round swollen cottonwoods pulls like tresses and torn paper.
Today I had a letter from France.
"What a truly civilized nation," my friend
wrote as she drank her morning coffee with thick cream
in a country cafe near Avignon.
"To my right a man in a black tuxedo
sips raspberry liqueur and soda."
And here on the same latitude we lie back at dawn
on the caving bank of the Bitterroot.
A shadow slips through the silver grasses, and then
a moth, and then the moon."