you are walking in the forest
sometimes follow, sometimes find,
the paths all bumble you under
through sometimes over-growth
you did not ask to be
here, in this place
of such terrible and wonderful things, things
you did not choose, fully knowing
or knowing mostly at all
and why is it that you, specifically,
with tendency to retread all these dead
and dying things
focus again and alone on the tragedy of it
as if that were the whole of it?
like you would keep your eyes open, down casting
for mushroom, shit, and slime,
without conception of their wonder, wonder all
for naturgemälde
speaks you:
if joy and music and beauty and love,
if jay and puffball and badger and you
cannot negate or conquer or destroy any fact
of the pain and the terror and the ending, well,
you just tell yourself, well,
the inverse, too,
must also be true
other things said
electrified wire!
all those spoken-for acres
i speak-for through