Unit 3: Selection Vocabulary 4

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day

Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper—
bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives

Hear it
through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs,
buses launching down avenues, the symphony
of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways,
the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.

Hear: the doors we open
for each other all day, saying: hello/shalom,
buon giorno/howdy/namaste/or buenos días
in the language my mother taught me—in every language
spoken into one wind carrying our lives
without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.

And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us—
facing the stars
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it—together.

My changing vision of the state of Florida is a neat optical trick of perspective, the way that when you walk toward a window that frames a distant tree, each step lets the greater landscape into the picture so that, though the tree is coming closer, it appears to shrink.

These things all coexist simultaneously, even while they are contradictory.

The good and the evil, the living and the dead, are tangled uneasily here together in a great inextricable knot.

Not far away, there’s a wood thrush singing, which is rare and getting rarer with the bird’s loss of habitat.

I am a small piece of a great web that is deepening and growing and becoming ever stranger and more fascinating with each accumulated moment.