How narrow each tree
in this newborn forest,
all the good
timber gone and replaced
with pin-oaks and paltry pines,
oh, someone must have enjoyed
a bountiful harvest from this land,
someone is living in houses with
solid redwood beams, with hand-forged nails
and thick planks, with
a toothless saw hung in some far corner,
unconcerned for the weakness they’ve
seeded in the world, someone who does not need view
bald hilltops nor
empty mines,
who scarcely considers those of us left in a
land of meek and meagre forests,
a land of empty traps and barren nets,
of particle-board and plaster,
we who must replant the forests
without ever guessing the end of this labor.

If there were only two humans left
to tread the endless waste of the world,
four feet limping endless miles,
if there were only two,
what reason would
drive a knife through a throat?
if there were ten? Twenty?
Would each demand a throne,
a continent,
would the last of us,
through will and violence,
greet extinction
with bloodied smiles?

I worry
that I will be old before I’m proud,
here, now, I am
tearing the strings loose from a coat,
seeing the hole widen and unravel.
The cold will get in here,
the damp,
I worry

We are still among the living
in function and in form,
we are outlasting each dull dawn
and surviving every storm
we are stolid as the stones
and more tired than the times –
we whittle down our meagre bones
and shape our troubles into rhymes.

Not all can be learned secondhand;
“The stovetop is hot”, she says,
but this means nothing
until we touch the red irons –
the truth of heat is searing and
unobscured by language.
and she says other things, yes,
“don’t mix beer and wine” or
“nothing good happens after midnight”
and she is right, as always,
she has touched these stovetops before,
but we are young and we are bold
and have no desire to learn about life secondhand,
no desire to intuit the taste of a meal
by devouring its leavings,
no, we deny these fair warnings
and lead ourselves, gleeful,
through hideous experience.