C o n s t a n c e H a n s e n —

Poem Outrunning River & Horse

for K8

You hate poems 

with rivers & horses 

in them. Give you 

a confusion of human 

skulls & diner mugs. 

We live on a fireball 

with a hard candy shell.

Whatever fed oceans 

before plastic continents

reverse engineered 

Pangea, whatever

carried mail 

coast to coast 

across a genocide

and back across 

an erasure— 

whatever ran 

in oil paintings 

in guest rooms—

what can they do 

to keep the trees 

from walking North?

His Name is Wolf

Eel / I think / the prehistoric / bedmate I chose / underwater / in the dome / in the Sound / on the field / trip in elementary / school / the aquarium / slumber party / everyone / was invited to / compulsorily / the opportunity / for some young / people to teach / the younger yet / their world is / precious / fragile / as the glass / that gives us / breath / recycled air / sniffles / giggles / fragile / as the hexagonal / panes between / the Salish sea / and our sleeping / bags / between me / and the lidless / eye of the wolf / eel / a creature / ugly as sin / innocent / as us / heirs / of a world / we believe in / well enough / if / that were enough // Adults already set it on fire // Every decade will be hotter // They knew / we knew it / since the Eighties / when no one seemed / to know / or care / where we were / or what / we were doing / or whether / grown / we’d find air / conditioning units / in the rush before / the first heat dome / to keep our own / kids cool / or how / we would atone / make amends / for generational / emissions / mass causalities / in wet bulb / temperatures / in the subtropics / where we sloughed / our debts / our debts compounded / by physics // Some benthic / realms of knowledge / won’t be bid / goodnight / so I bow my / dreamless head / in the direction / of the old / soul of the world / who sleeps / in the deep / eyes open

Caledonia

Having claimed that people who say they haven’t seen God are looking too hard, I am pressed to provide an example.

Take, for instance, the clearing where the grasses whitened in the limp, winter light of the North.

An opening caught a drop of low cloud cover from the hoary canopy of a distant wood, which I had to drag near enough to enter with all its stories inside me, near enough to enter as a set of well-wrapped bones jingling a shiver, to purge myself of fantasy and make way for new genres.

One boot in the undergrowth, I toed the sodden colorlessness with the other, exhuming decay and transformation, wondering at the definition of trespass when I raised my eyes to meet the exposed footprint of a house, all collapsed brick and char.

Where ruin had come and gone, stood a doorframe with no door and nothing to hold on to but its foundation.

Would I, making the sign, approach the hollow perimeter of a rectangle marking the threshold between two distinct possibilities that would be one but for an unlikely persistence?

Or would I stumble back into the taiga, tongueless and convinced?

Phantom tarpans may belie their extinction, but not justify it, were the ferns to rustle.

Will future anthropologists say the same of us?

Having read that Thomas Edison napped with a steel ball in each hand so that a jolt would permit a dream to answer a question, I replicated the experiment as a child.

The moment before the stone met the floor, a vision revealed a course of evolution from primate to alien with man in the middle, implying flying saucers bear unsmiling descendants just as great ships bore unsmiling antecedents.

It may well be that our progeny mean no harm, but suffer a need to understand what in the everliving fuck happened.

If a great optimism is required to make space among the hard facts of anguish for deities and other unidentified flying objects, so be it.

Like so many children, I was an optimist.

Bless my little head and that of the wild horse with its proud profile still existent on cave walls.