It's Gettin' Kinda Hectic

It is so permanent here,
like when you're dead you are dead.
So many hurdles it feels like One,
that I have draped myself over,

Verge of getting up, this pastoral scene looked different when it was Antietam,

or when they built these mounds.

The flood was not a myth but a continuing reality, the waves of earth mounded by extinct cultures, rolling over our psyche like invisible tsunamis.

The terrible fog in mountains the terrible cumulus slow like Plath's mushroom fists. Rolls over us.

Scurrying, our entire life sometimes, as when the sun went down in time lapse and the men on the shore did not watch, for they had no nets to tend, or earth to turn.

Imagine that, them not looking up from their nets, silver with fish, silver with salmon. Unheard of, I think. Not looking up at the slow, slow dance.

Rolls over us, the soft insistent pulse of the dead before us, the ancient dead, the long slow dead, a wave crashing like earthworms on callused eardrums, a soft murmur of agony of a dead outnumbered by the living, dead men outnumbered by dead animals and the living men. Dead animals outnumbering living animals. Dead passenger pigeons, fluttering about our soundtracks, unheard.

Imagine that this week not once...
They did not look up from their hands, they did not look up from each other, the living, they did not look up at the dead blowing slowly over the setting sun, breathing its breath on the damp grass, stirring itself out of the soil, opening its warm guts to the soil, the dead and the never living circle in arabesque grooves, between the roots, and in the water, the dead gurgle, asking us to slow,

asking us to sleep.