How Evolution Might Work    

    

Can you hand your feet over to an untrodden road,

wander and wonder, meander beyond

your grandparents’ immigrant lives?

Can you allow intoxication to enter your life

in rain-sifted moonlight glazing your face

on that spacious trail ahead where a silver

stream roars unceasingly, pours over granite

and sandstone as July’s sun sings high above?

Your bronze skin warmed by this path and by strangers

with dogs, backpacks and tents upon whom you gaze

softly, sometimes befriend;

warmed too by your triumphs and day’s hidden dangers,

the copious blunders you’ve agreed somehow to shoulder,

this burden of tiredness followed by shimmering mornings

when you breathe easy and slow, when you’re heartened

by dark coffee in a blue tin cup, a stand of birch trees

in breezes swaying, two squirrels that levitate up

a thick Douglas fir.

Air tingles and sparkles as you shout out a tune found

in your dreams, then bloom into daylight stumbling

and flailing, soberly cavorting along this stone river twisting.

The world’s become your tavern where nothing’s wasted

nor cloistered, and you a drunk thanking his ancestors,

even making friends with old failures and angers, aging

towards mercy, towards stillness, giving and growing.

You’re a sunburnt monk of evolving surprises, a mad

Bacchus dancing in thirst-slaking moonshine, savoring

every slip-up, each step and each stagger,

every well tasted sip of Life’s river flowing.