Before the Eyes of the Earth We Are Eternal
Everything that remains
Remembers how to love:
These two stumps cuddle one another
In their roots, staying together
In the arms of the earth
Where their ghosts and shadows
Remember a whole heaven of leaves,
Of swaying in the wind. The seed
They made with such longing
Enters their sweet decay
To rise up singing.
The last bee does not desert
The last flower.
The last of the day
Announces itself
On the mountaintop;
Fruit makes its wild red remarks
On the pale edge of winter,
Asking to be chewed and buried
For its sweetness.
Our bones remember
The skin we are to them,
The muscle that wrapped us to them,
Stroking our way in great lakes
That faced the sun wholeheartedly,
Consumed with being here,
With lying wholly in the arms
Of the possible.
At the gate of the day after
There is a core of each of us left.
When we have been eaten in this time
We get up and stretch
Our infinite invisible legs
To walk to that time
Where the eyes of the earth
Can see us once again.
This poem was originally published in Fireweed.
