Creation

For days, weeks at a time, i lose whatever it is
which keeps my senses softened to the sentience of the earth,
to hillside grass running lightly before a silver wind
or a far slope rippling like a muscled shoulder
or how the gradine, faceted pebbles under me will rasp
as i ease in closer, resting my back
against the rough-skinned body of a gliricidia.

All this can suddenly go without a hint
like a room slips into darkness with a passing cloud—
except, i don't know how,
it happens with no slippage of the sense of self.
On drizzled mornings, when a silver fluttering beats to a white rush down the hills,
i can believe that seraphs bear the rain to us.
By afternoon, wind has lost color, stones are exactly stones,
the green ascending hill has stiffened into a surveyor's gradient.
The names by which i used to call the earth to come to me
have hardened in my mouth to scabs.

Who was it then who saw the wings of seraphs?
And who is looking now, squinting with eyes of quartz?
i want to understand how, inhabitants of the same life,
they do not know each other, they have never met;
how, looking out of the same windows, they see different worlds.
i want to find a way that they may see each other.
i want them—the glint-eyed one of rationed sight,
       the other, dream blinded even in the day's light—
to meet and in that meeting learn a threefold vision
that hopefully i may translate into new lines of language,
lines braided from their voices and my own speaking together,
an utterance which, if even for the duration of only a few words,
will speak our earth original again into creation.