The Sounds of the Universe Coming Through My Window

The Mill Valley trees, the pines with green mint look

And there's a tangled eucalyptus hulk stick

Fallen through the late sunlight tangle of those needles

Hanging from it like a live wire connecting it to the ground

Just below, the notches where little Fred

Sought to fell the sad pine, not bleeding much

Just a lot of crystal sap the ants are mining in

Motionless like cows on the grass

So they must be aphids percolating up with steam

To store provender in their bottomless bellies

That for all I know are bigger than the bellies

Of the universe beyond

The little tragic windy cottages

On the high last city ward hill

Today roosting in sun-hot dream

Above the tree head of seas and meadow patch

Whilst tee kee kee purl the birdies and mumums

Mark and ululate moodily

In this valley of peaceful firewood

In stacks that make you think of Oregon

In the morning in 1928

When Back was home on the range lake

And his hunting knife threw away

And went to sit among the ponderosa pines

To think about love, his girl's bare bodice

Like a fennel seed, the navel in her milk bun

Shorty McGonagle and Roger Nolte

Held up the Boston bank and murdered a girl in these old woods

And next you saw the steely green iron photograph

In True Detective, showing black blotches

In the black blotch running culvert

By the dirty roadside, not Oregon at all

Or Jim Back so happy with his mouth

A blade of grass depending

Hummingbird hums hello, bugs race and swoop

Two ants hurry to catch up with lonely Joe

The tree above me is like a woman's thigh

Smooth eucalyptus bumps and muscle swells

I would I were a weed a week would leave

Why was the rat mixed up in the sun?

Because Bodhidharma came from the west

With dark eyebrows and China had a mountain wall

And mists get lost above the Yangtze gorge

And this is a mysterious yak