Often I feel, especially when I'm alone,
the presence of silence in the world
and in my life as something that I'm seriously
negotiating with for the poem.
And sometimes it's the green world,
and sometimes it's a pain or speechlessness.
And sometimes it's the silence of pure fact, scientific fact.
Or whatever it is, it really feels very powerful.
And on this particular day when this poem began,
I was alone in my house when I was in Arcata.
And I was watching a bird in the yard.
And birds tend to do this often, this thing which
is called anting, which is they originally are intending
to clean themselves by taking dust up into their feathers
to clean themselves and then let it go.
And sometimes they will-- when they can't really find dust,
they will take ants up into their feathers.
And it's quite a good contract between the ants and the birds.
And sometimes they will be mistaken and take other things.
I read all this in a book, a wonderful 19th century
book about birds and birdsong, which compared the--
assured me that the song of the Western Meadowlark
was the opening chords of La traviata.
I believed everything in the book after that.
This is a poem in three sections.
The man mentioned in the second section, Werner Herzog,
is a filmmaker.
I think you're probably familiar with him.
"The Age of Reason."
One.
The anxious bird in the lush spring green is anting.
which means in my orchard, he has opened his wings
over a furious anthill and will take up
into the delicate ridges of quince yellow feathers
a number of tiny, angry creatures
that will inhabit him, bewildered no doubt, traveling
deep into the air on this feathery planet new life.
We don't know why they do it.
At times they'll take on almost anything that
burns, spreading their wings over coals, over cigarette
butts, even mistakenly on bits of broken glass.
Meanwhile, the light keeps stroking them
as if it were love.
The garden continues its work all around them,
the gradual openings that stand for death.
Under the plastic ground cover, the human garden
grows, help sticks and knots, row after row.
Who wouldn't want to take into the self something that
burns, or cuts, or wanders lost over the body?
Two.
At the end of Werner Herzog's Woyzeck,
after the hero whom we love, who is mad,
has murdered the world, the young woman who is his wife,
and loved her, and covered himself with blood,
he grows frightened by how quickly she softens and takes
on the shape of the soil.
In the moonlight, he throws his knife
into the wide river flowing beside them,
but doesn't think it has reached deep enough,
so goes in after it himself.
White as a knife, he goes in after it completely.
The trees are green.
The earth is green.
The light is sick with green.
Now that he's gone, the woman is a tiny gap in green.
Next day in slow motion, the undertakers and philosophers,
it is the age of reason, wander through
the tall and glossy ferns and grasses
looking for the instrument.
It's spring.
The air is gold.
Every now and then, they lift the white sheet
they have laid to see what death is.
They are meticulous.
The day is everything they have.
Three.
How far is true enough?
How far into the earth can vision go and still be love?
Isn't the honesty of things where they resist,
where only the wind can bend them back,
the real weather, not our desire, hissing,
tell me your parts that I may understand
your body, your story, which is why
we have characters and the knife of a plot
to wade through this current.
Now it blossoms back to back through the orchard,
a surf of tenderness.
There is no deep enough, for what
we want to take inside of us, whole orchard, color, name,
scent, symbol, raw pale blossoms, wet black arms,
there is no deep enough."