remembering/forgetting

days of hunger, days of appetite's absence,
days of labor and long naps
that arrive nowhere:
where do you depart to when
the singing of frogs arise,
cutting the night's density
like a thousand little saws
preparing the lumber of tomorrow?

i am a carpenter shopping for fish,
a fisherman netting hours,
laboring like a farmer planting time,
harvesting the rays of sun and threshing
the wheat of golden seasons.

i am accustomed to these rituals of passage.

i awake and set forth each day,
winding the clock and tracking the sky,
measuring each cloud and finding
only birds with feathers of rain.

what has happened?
did we live only to go on dying?
did we yearn to forget so much
we left our luggage on the platform
and boarded the wrong train,
leaving behind an empty station?

maybe we no longer understand ourselves,
with our barbaric words and science of extinction.

and so the heart wills itself
onward, pulsing its heat and current,
always wanting us to listen and hear, to understand,
to cease the damage of wearisome words,
to forget the newspapers, the sidewalks,
the steel towers and the unreachable palace,
to forget the dwindling past that kills us
like a suffocating shadow, to seek our voice
in rambling rivers, renewing our song
as spring is overrun by frogs.

we need to sit at the edge of the sea
and beg for our own forgiveness,
to cast the stones of forgetfulness
into the empty sea.