Soil

I like to think that the baby  

laying on her milk-flesh spine 

in a buggy on a spring night maybe,  

and looking upward all the time, 

might think 

that she’s the stars. 

    I like to imagine 

small children make-believing

that their lungs are bigger 

than the Milky Way. 

    Later depression comes 

mostly because of this confusion 

about directions. 

    If up 

was that feeling we felt, 

rain full as the dome of a sky, 

eyes pressed to the moon, 

able to climb even

the tallest of the trees

    then down 

must be broken heart and leaving.

    Like a wave we rebel. 

    In a hundred nights we write 

a hundred poems for grief. 

    We sleep, or eat, or write, or love, 

too much or too little. 

    We learn to be alone. 

    We learn salvation 

is our own affair. 

    We forget 

the downwardness of sadness, 

the upward pull of bliss, 

is really a metaphor. 

    That those chains 

of elephants in Botswana  

rarely look up from the ground’s red bake. 

    That leopards never mate in stars. 

    That the fire-ant is only sacred 

because of the fine dust 

on her hunched shoulders.

    Like a boat on waves 

we go up and down. 

    Let them be 

neither prison nor inheritance; 

but perhaps a chance, now and again, 

to grow somehow closer to the soil.