You found a land where names for things
had been erased.
The people there, the animals & plants
& stones,

they welcomed you anyway
with elegant indifference. And

you gave them names. You resisted their refusals.
It was pleasant

learning to worship refusal.

Arrival was endless, for instance.
And

it was a late time, a tarnished season.
Little melodies, little rain.
And then

the rain arrived,
the era of the end of leaves,
the nights all recurve & flint.

In that land, hauling sacks of names
you pitched a tent,
a dome of breath,
by forty-seven streams,

and slept outside of it.

A small tent, of course, and the sacks,

they needed to stay dry.

There were other ways to be embraced.

Everything pelvic & potluck,
everything goblinate — fanaticism

no longer came to mind,
the land so fully inhabited it. Yes,

the land there — & all the things upon it —
were tired of reaching for the sky.

You studied the hemlocks.
You saw them losing needles, growing out

of touch with their roots.
They tried being

bridges for squirrels, perches
for heron. Some blamed it

on aphids. Others blamed it on greed.
The aphids were thriving, it was clear,
as much as the others,
the lovers of blame.

How bemused the owls remained,
the few that remained,

and shy.
You took one
for stock. Talons, skull, beak.
All night it simmered.
Later
you courted forever on the wilds of such drink,

for a while,
a slow while & tremoring
and prior to anything resembling a name.