In

We did not need, at first,
to know what mountain the mountain was.

We did not need to know
who it was who crossed the low thresholds after midnight.

We knew only that the mulch of November
would dry around our feet
if we waited for you
til June.  

What a vigil the moon becomes then.
What a mass that crests from our chins.

Operate on my conscience, will you,
like a child,
or a God,
or something that makes the ears ring with empty air and terror…

Oh schoolmaster, oh policeman, oh ticket officer in the sky,
you are telling us always why we have been selected;
if we had only the porridge within us to understand your language,
the gherkin to glean your vernacular.

We did not need to know,
at first, what mountain the mountain was.

Or what this word meant to that,
or who begot whom in the dampened ditch,
or what raving star it was
that first blinked into the night sky.

We only knew that across the mulch were trees. And that it was a good feeling  
to have a friend you believe in.
The sound of the mulch conveys infinity—   the unending march to the trees:
out of the Proterozoic slime,
out of the fizzing, teeming, mass of things, out of the furnace that invents our obligations.

What bleeding gum,
what lacerated small intestine,
regurgitated us here
into this broken jaw of lands?

Oh, if I could get my hands on the hands that placed us here
I would wring each finger, one by one,  
like the neck of a chicken
      and lace them back together in a twisted tumbleweed of screams and compunction.