Tracks of my children in the deep snow.
The moment sure to fade with wind and next storms
And then the coming Spring, maturity.
The sterile moon now just past full
Giving its pale desolation almost beauty
If you catch it right, on the snow with a distant star
Just concealing beyond the glare of our everpresent lights.

I dreamed of the old dead poet Bly.
Is he really dead?
No matter as I am unlikely to call him now,
He who slept on my parent’s spare bed and
Made a living doing poems and his man, father, savage thing.
Modern story of the dispossessed children of alcoholics,
Dreams like a mandala,
A burning passion for a greater art leading stable work a day men
To spend and leave their families,
Say strange, far off things and drink.

Most stay.
We gather our vacation things and head back to town.
We don’t have the daily artistic work habit or the time
To bring great works to pass.
Even fragments seem destined to be lost
Like those little foot prints
Filling with the blowing snow.

Childhood is bigger than we imagine.
A great canopy of clouds or leaves and sky above,
Huge landscapes of the accepted strange all about us.

We imagine the world fixed and us new,
Coming into it’s vastness
As if our parents have always been married,
As if the nation were as the earth,
Stable, eternal and suburban.

In the history of ideas babes place themselves surely likely
Maybe to discover another light bulb,
A cure or passageway to the amazingly not yet discovered infinity
Of the internal world, our internal world.

And what a world we grow.
Archetypes still wet with their birth,
Power struggles with towering adults still in their prime,
Dreaming salves into us from long nursed scars.
The battles, the horizons,
No wonder, spread about their mess of toys and pieces,
The kids need more time
To put all of this together.

Phrases from the collective language
Burnished over time by quick use
Grabbing the nearest thing to explain,
Getting it across simply to a child is vast.

Because the world curled like a snail inside her ear.
Like the dawn making its slow call to brightness,
Like the morning fox silently passing between parked cars
Like a meal steams,
Like the atoms circle, mysterious as planets,
Numberless and everywhere yet in presence,
So essential that we miss them growing from the miraculous,
To how we understand, still back lit, eerie
And not quite made.