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      By Big Bald Creek

Let me not dream beside the waters of Babylon

but name them Big Bald Creek, harsh, alive

in the mouth and mind. And if its myriad voices stir

my restless ears to the lull of half-heard music,

let me hear them speak too the clamor of a peopled world’s despair

between opposing dream and fact.

When vision breaks through my windowed will

in the timeless pause where even these waters quiet

and the mind soars between two beats of heart

into the known shapes of time past and time to come,

let its voice guide me, alone but not apart,

willing on wings,

through the raucous, neon puppetry of city streets,

the boom and whine and coupling crash of commerce

and its invisible precession of genes and buried spirit.

Not only in these free mountain waters

do my deep roots feed, or in the oceans

that stretch from star to star, but through the narrow,

mind-bricked streets that breed and channel

paste and paper hoards shuffling

in the fixed goose-step of ghosts.

There too may God build, while it is still the Seventh Day,

Man from the mob’s clay.

Then, Babylon, my voice will play

true counterpoint to yours.