A THOUSAND STAMPEDING ELEPHANT HOOVES

A thousand stampeding elephant hooves
making the earth their drum with their
cosmic beat reaching earth’s molten core
the energy dissolving in fiery thick atomic soup blast

The beat of a trillion gnat wings soda crackering
above an abyss and catching sun rays so it
looks like the air’s been slivered into trillions of
twinkling slivers spelling out some Morse Code no
mortal can decipher though intelligent angels might understand

One second’s worth of the breaths of everyone on earth
the moment caught as our breaths enter their apogee and release
exhaling the subtlest delicate tidal wave of fineness that
wavers a frail plant blade somewhere perhaps or
may make a cloud move a fraction and
the climate change from fair to foul or from foul to fair

eyeblinks flickering with the same stampeding energy though a
bit more quietly than those stampeding elephant hooves of the
first stanza more like the gnat wings of the second
and the gossamer thought of the Creator of all this as it
shimmers in the mind’s heart or the heart’s mind
like a distant star made suddenly near
or like a near-most phenomena taking place in an
evanescent dazzle in unending darkness

His near brooding hovering over us
His dear concern for each breath of us each lid-beat heart-
throb of each tiniest one of us from
first to last with no clear hierarchy
since the worm wriggles to its own safety in the mud
and the fly buzzes across a pond at daybreak with the
same brilliant aplomb as a commuter intent on
making it safely across the bridge into New Jersey on a
Monday or Tuesday and those

elephant hooves making their definite music somewhere
behind us and the beat of starlight making its
metronomic pulse with the same rhythmic regularity
somewhere above us

              11/23/2002