The Great Turning

What the world needs now is dust covered rocks
Submerged in cold streams and tumbled till the oil releases from the center
Is there oil in the center of rocks?

Once, I opened my eyes under water and made contact with a seals gaze
these were the years I lived in a cove with a boney man who slept on the wooden floor

A rock in the garlic field is about the size of a human head
A cantaloupe is about the size of a human head
A lion's mane mushroom is about the size of a brain
A walnut is the size of a squirrel's brain
A raisin is the size of a cancerous growth in the lungs
Violence, poverty, water, fire, a great turning away from the center has caused weather

This glass of water has both dew from the beginning of time and airplane fuel
We hold a woven bag of foraged mushrooms together, we hold our children, we hold a house, we hold a mortgage, we hold another one, we hold each other ransom

A marriage needs a village, a village needs a village, anger needs a village, collecting wood needs many hands, many hands need wood, wood needs a village of trees

This glass of dew has round up in it
This tear has to be kissed away for the child or he won’t stop

If you lift the rock in the garlic field, you might find the ring that slipped off a winter finger—
Or was that swimming in the marble quarry?
Cold fingers retracting from metal bands,
We expand and contract like jellyfish, the moon and I move like seahorses across the sky

What the world needs now is dust covered books
Cracked open spines
Someone who knows about building cathedrals with garbage—

This is a cornice, this is a crevice,
made from tin foil, maple resin and melted keyboards

Our hero will know how to repair a book with human hair, bits of telephone wire, rainwater
How to read a book

If you want to be a hero, carve a small house out of a bar of soap and leave it in the garden,
Build a house out of soapstone bricks and put the junkies in velvet beds
Carve a soapstone amulet for my neck,
Make a small film set in a rodeo, the central act a chorus of husbands lassoing their middle aged brides

Once women were so weighed down with gold they needed wheelchairs
Their muscles atrophied
And that is how lonely it feels to be married to the town doctor
What the world needs now is the opposite action

What the world needs now is mothers floating on salanated rivers
Their bodies soft from sleep
Their words becoming the words of grandmothers
Their words a song of the great turning towards the center