72

A Crocus as a Cro-Magnon Crow Croaking

If you burden me with the proverbial straw

are you the source of my distress?

Or the all-knowing stars in the abyss

between my familiar face and the fact of me?

Even chosen for us, destiny is the choice

we each, alone, choose forever, in each smallest choice.

Perhaps indeed you know me, as do the absolute stars,

in some dark well beyond thought or words,

and can still fail me, belaboring straws.

What does it matter?

Under the stars it is not you troubles me,

but them:

the quiet certainty of their inexorable courses,

of our meaning.

Sometimes I watch in the first crocus, sunlit in my garden,

the luminous thrust behind the dark swirl

at the root and the height of things.

And if sometimes, betrayed to man’s nightmare, I cry out,

beneath my pillow, under the ominous dream

I hear echo some such small light

calling the rest of me awake by naming

only one syllable of my name.