How much of this and that
is genealogy?
What comes with the past?
Why is my hair brown,
my eyes an absent color?
What combines genes and spirit?
What is, and what isn’t?
I am rain and light,
a pebble in a creek,
sometimes rainbow,
for an instant,
the weight of twenty feathers
fluttering.
An avalanche of embraces
in a tree,
absolute divinity of tears,
the Pieta inside mothers.
Off the scale meadow fields
laden down by flowers,
running legs measured
by a thousand miles,
and eyes tracing a universe
of stars,
seeing me.
Twenty million dreams
lighting up the atoms
in a drop of water,
that much squandered
into lakes and bogs,
with poems put together
out of words.
It’s all part of me,
a big part of you,
so much eternity
the future can’t hold it all,
prologue to a pedigree
made largely out of love.