For the Animal

How do I somehow 

still 

not know myself?
 

Something in the marrow

says:

you and me

you and me
 

running along the same river.

Let me slip 

into the greenish underwater

and access what I know

from way before.
 

Both of us, in wombs.  

In the inward

are we not

still interior?
 

Or can we get to that interior?
 

*

There was a place we didn’t see

but thought of 

in our sleep.

Its contours echo in the blood.
 

You said, ‘I’ll find the interior.’
 

*
 

My home, my home.

Deep in the heart of--
 

--oh, all kinds of places things can grow.

In sidewalk cracks and empty jars. Lichen filigrees the grave.

A slime takes hold of the valves 

of the heart that it eats.
 

Something in us is hungry.
 

That something is us or 

is that something

something else?

A symbiont.
 

*
 

Sympathy for the animals. You forgot 

you are an animal. You forgot we all came 

from the handful 
 

of drifting debris 

on an exhale.  
 

A murmur, regret.  

Blown over the land,

entangled, not free,

we are not.

*
 

(Years later, when the bar is trying to close,

I insist, 
 

‘we have to progress

from this darkness.

We have to achieve

a more perfect darkness.’
 

But take it, gently,

from my hands.)