Catechism

A child said What is the grass?

fetching it to me with full hands,

and I took the grass and held it

with reverence and answered:

It is blade and sheath and collar and crown.

It is rhizome and inflorescence.

It is the old-growth forest of the ant,

the city of worms, habitat for fireflies.

It braces dunes from sea to shining sea.

It is what survives between wagon ruts

in Kansas and what endures along Nebraska

swales. It is native prairie. It is sheep meadow.

It is cud in a cow’s stomach, a basket

in the Lowcountry of South Carolina,

the stain on a center fielder’s home whites.

Finally, because I was not sure the child

understood sheath or swale or baseball,

and because I could not lie, I said,

it is herbicide and insecticide, fungicide

and ozone, sulfur dioxide and dust,

and the child, finally, nodded.

*Note: This poem begins with a first line from a section (6) in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

Bounty

All truths wait in all things,

just as time waits inside a clock,

released in seconds like morphine drips

or eye drops. Here, the clock says,

hold out your hands, hold out your tongue,

bring a sack to carry the bounty of seconds

and minutes and hours I shall bestow unto you,

and I come to it, tongue out, and catch

seconds like snowflakes or a tincture

of vitamin D. It all dissolves,

which is the truth that waits inside the clock.

But there is truth outside the clock, too,

because there is truth in all things.

Time lives inside of us as muscle or fat

and it lives outside of us as books

or cello suites. Our bodies hold

and release that truth, books

hold and release that truth,

cello suites hold and release this truth –

the whole cycle a kind of breathing,

the whole truth a kind of clock.

*Note: This poem begins with a first line from a section (30) in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”