Swarming with flea-sized ecstasies, pin-pricked

with the scientific names of the numinous

bats that riot through the plum-dawn light,

I’ve lugged this hindbrain through funerals,

mitzvahs, & algebra, reciting firecat, reciting cloud-puffball,

subsisting on little more than speech-balloons & rain,

only to arrive at another streambed scintillating

with foamy prisms of toxic coal-cleaner still abounding

in bees, sticky-legged & busy, ceaselessly crawling

with damselflies in the midst of making more damselflies

thinking nothing of me caught up in my thinking

that the world is only what it is & I am on it

like a tick, like a turtle hitching a ride on the back

of an alligator to get from shore to shore.