Anvil

When a black butterfly flits past,

when you glimpse the outlines of apple trees,

when you smell the sprig of sunrise and walk up to the ditch,

when Bering Aleut, Juma, Tuscarora join the list of vanished languages,

when you turn a spigot and irrigate blossoming pear trees,

when the time of your life is a time of earthquakes,

when a woman, hit by a car while crossing the street, recovers then slides into pain,

when a matsutake emerges out of the rubble of Hiroshima,

when a bartender blows smoke rings and slips through hoops into his past,

when foragers slice russulas, amanitas, clitocybes and pursue red-capped boletes,

when water slips through roots, rises through a trunk, streams into leaves,

when in our bodies we sway and flood,

when you bloody your hands,

when the mind like this Earth is struck and tilts its axis,

when, under summer stars, you have built a cabin in the wilderness,

when you gaze at Aldebaran and sense a first frost on the grass,

when in our bodies we ride the waves of our Earth,

here is the anvil on which to hammer your days—