THE UNNAMABLE RIVER (excerpt)

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Is it in the anthracite face of a coal miner,

crystalized in the veins and lungs of a steel

worker, pulverized in the grimy hands of a railroad engineer?

Is it in a child naming a star, coconuts washing

ashore, dormant in a volcano along the Rio Grande?

You can travel the four thousand miles of the Nile

to its source and never find it.

You can climb the five highest peaks of the Himalayas

and never recognize it.

You can gaze through the largest telescope

and never see it.

But it’s in the capillaries of your lungs.

It’s in the space as you slice open a lemon.

It’s in a corpse burning on the Ganges,

in rain splashing on banana leaves.

Perhaps you have to know you are about to die

to hunger for it. Perhaps you have to go

alone into the jungle armed with a spear

to truly see it. Perhaps you have to

have pneumonia to sense its crush.

But it’s also in the scissor hands of a clock.

It’s in the precessing motion of a top

when a torque makes the axis of rotation describe a cone:

and the cone spinning on a point gathers

past, present, future.