Standing in a Clearing


What will you do, the large world
Scattered behind you, leaves a live red?
As dead branches crack under your feet
And you look across
The tilted face of a stump
At stories of orbit and eclipse
In a whorl of sawmarks,

What will you do?
In this inexpedient place,
Sun eats the heavy paint
From 55-gallon drums;
Your whirled nerves
Are worth no more than leaves, your fingernail
Is dead as the branch your foot lifts.

What will you do?
The pattern of past growth
Circles its axis of origin, hardening
In its own acids; but can still become
Whatever you want to make of every day
Of the long years
Stored in the pine stump like a battery.

Here, dialectic washes in the mud.
What, the world your wood,
Will you do with life
Explosive in the sun
In its chemical miracle,
Consumed as you are in this place,
In the moment of your hand

On the motor housing,
Fingering marks of dried gasoline?
Afoul of fall, the leaves
Are fouled with all, fluttering, falling,
Found underfoot,
A sound underfoot,
Rot under root,

Barked with the brown of days, done, down,
All ground and sand unsound underfoot;
And with your only life
Widening from a point
Of origin, and bound
By dark encircling crust, you stand
Almost autonomous,

Ringed by the fallen bronze
Of the trees
Which rise between down and none
And noun and done,
To choose whatever you can
If you can
As all the stained wood is dyed and dries.

These motley leaves
Are made the fools of fall;
Now that the air has made a fuel of all,
An unclogged ooze of days
Wrung from the trees,
A rotten ripeness looks from every pool.
Tasting fall in the fell cool of the wood, what

Are you going to do with your life?
After the caught
Noise, vibrant rasp, and rise
Of chainsaw sounds
You are
The gasoline motor shaking in your hands,
The smell of fuel,

The readiness of air.