Newly from heaven,
little brother,
come see this world
and I will taste again
around you
the sprouting of wisdom:
mushrooms and puff balls,
thistles and gooseberries,
rhubarb, and lily stamen like matches
smeared against rocks.

Find the world.
Find the porcupine you cannot see,
the donut snakes swallowing their tails in the stagnant ditches,
the rising soul vapors of toads,
gliding squirrels, and broken robins
buried with full rites
beneath the moss carpet
of our animal graveyard.

Let it be that you are born,
that you have displaced the stars of this, my galaxy,
disturbed the lights of the sky.
Let it be that you will ride in the cab of the U-haul.
As always, I will go forth first and best.
I will stick my head from the station wagon’s window
and turn it in motion’s gale to look back at you.
My hair will wave in the traffic.
My glasses will glint in the sun.
Here we go little brother,
me first and best
into our changing worlds.

Today,
twenty years ago,
I saw you pause,
prayer-less hands
clasped,
head bowed,
still as theater.
Quiet.
Electrical.

Then
startling,
sudden,
decisive,
you crumbled the crackers
even as you released them
into your soup
with a deft dusting
of your hands.
One motion.
Nothing wasted.
I looked.
I felt the stir of revelation
that never broke.

Twenty years;
the light of that moment swells outward
at Eridani’s distance now.
And I have been Galileo,
peering through cylinders
and ground glass
at the befuddling blurs
wreathing his beloved Saturn.
Years pass.
The apparition comes and
goes,
advances,
retrogrades.
The chasm
between image and comprehension
yawns wider.

What is this that I can only look
and look upon
and never see?
And shall I pass not knowing Her greater truth?

You screamed with your mouth still closed,
she said.
A horrible sound, she said.

Coffee stings my lip
and I recall
flailing,

thrashing webs,

bulbous abdomens
smearing my face,

fear, venom,
panic, pain.

How does one fall
mute through smothered horror,
then arc darkward
forgetting?

Terror,
laid out like a robe
for the light of breakfast.

Now sleeps the sun,
And the living world
Dreams upon the sky
Cold, silent fire,
Raging shimmers of green striving with powers of blue.
Gather now,
Round fires dim made bright by gloom,
And I will gaze and tell you truths seen only by the old.

For behold,
The world is old, old beyond the furthest count.
I cast my eyes from east to west,
And see the young are old,
The old are gone,
And in breaching agony and blood
Always more arrive:
From warmth into cold, seeking warmth;
From shelter into the open, seeking shelter;
From one into many, seeking the One.

Here, within the whirling dance of many Norths,
We wander, flock, we nest, as spirits call and winds decree,
While tusks and antlers wander, herding toward a covenant only they can sense.
How long shall we winter away, buried from the wind,
Tombed against the cold, laying sides together,
Making long shadows upon ceilings of ice?

Our ancient mothers’ fathers tracked beneath a different sky,
A wider land away beneath the setting sun.
There, mountains bled
And smoky ravens spoke their riddles to the keepers of the fire.
For there were days before fire came into our captivity of stone,
Before the first stone was ever flaked,
Before our gifts of tongues, or hands,
Or eyes to make sensible the light.
There was a day before the sky was lifted,
Before the sea rained down,
A day before the stars, or moon,
When all things lay buried in the unborn dark.

Tonight, at light’s end, we praise things yet born.
For the world is young, younger than it is old.
We are destined to another land
A wider truth.
Every year the ice gives up a step, leans back into the cliffs.
Buried valleys make smothered groans beneath the crushing ice.
We are destined to palm, to claw, to climb, to fall.
We are destined to pass worlds,
Reach new totems and appease new powers,
Or else to die in the high whiteness of pitiless chance.

Our hope passes, spills and flourishes.
I gaze a remnant,
Those favored by gods petty and obscure.
They rise high above our drowned steps,
Stand and straigten in the sun’s full light
To look back and see only mystery, emptiness.
I see them, gaze and see them
Rising up to the dreamtime fires.

I
am five.
I hide inside
my father’s dark,
cavernous tool shed.

Hot
stifled air.
Daylight waits,
lays ambush outside,
looks in at the gaps, cracks.

Dark
slowly
fades like
a fog lifting.
Gasoline smells.

Then:
one, three
five butterflies,
black, mottled grey,
violet glyphs upon their wings.

They
rest, silent
on exposed
studs, like flies
picking carrion ribs clean.

They
flex their
leaf wings with
one silent whisper.
Wait. Then another.

I
see
seven, ten,
fifteen. They
are always more.

They
surround
me. I pull
my arms in,
step to center.

I
breathe
hard once.
I wait. Then
another breath.

It
is yet
another
encounter
with the Hidden.
Here, silent spirits
dry their wings
in the
dark.