WORKING

Today, you work.  You forge a clearing.

You've planted your prospect - a nudity that persuades - leading explorers from outside in, from border to center, from straight directly into twist.

This creation has cost you in exquisite ways. What remains of you settles in a somewhat out-of-body exhaustion, like the post-orgasmic waste that follows a rendering from inside and outside your mechanism.

Your design, so well planted, you thought, was bequeathed to you by a perennial world.

UNDIVIDING

Today, needles hold you - your Buddhahood tested by the smallest flies - your legs tired from living - your voice tired from throwing - your treetops crowded again.

Today, an exotic beetle scales the mundane. You follow it to its open hiding place.

Today, a vista of orange mud floods paradise, and you consume the view - nourishing your dry wings, and reclaiming the root system you had forsaken for ground.

THRESHOLDING

Today, you lie between. --Half-drawn lids, half-hungry bin, half-seeing somnambulance.

Today, a bright heat melts the angles of you - brings you to your suddenly self.

Today, pounding sounds wake you in rhythms of troughs.

Today, I graze your outgrowths, and I seek a resting place for my wide-awake hands.

Today, life passes as you notice at its tail. You're too comfortable to hunt, and too wise to say, "goodbye."

EMBODYING

Today, you hear me. I speak to you from the earth; you listen from the sky. We come together in a simple kiss - a dry consummation of many rains - running, running, river-making, creek-bed-upraking, mother-slaking.

And where is your mother? --Standing as the hills? Holding forth as she straddles two mountains, licking her lips from the pain? Is your mother embedded in the stomach of a heart with a mind for feasting?

--Something like that, yes.

And, you are your mother's mountains - mimicking mounds with your fingertips, emptying skies with a single inhalation, surrounding lakes with the arms you've borrowed, the arms you've made, and the arms you propagate in waves.