Projection as a new man

For once, I don't care about my shadow. I do not watch it dissolve into quiet jade earth. It is too late to turn around & ask questions against the light. It is late dusk when the mountain range, first to darken, is stripped of boulder and definition until it is as flat as the porcelain moon growing inside. So black that it is no longer a mountain, but a mouth, a tunnel dug into the clear coral hour. Where is the way in? the pale breeze carries only salt in-

Land. It can

Travel for miles unseen. Escape its place of origin. The home address. It is like the soul in this way. They say the soul is what changes even while our bodies do not. Will not. They say this in spite of injury & age. The soul is what changes like kaolinite shipped between countries or generations. Not the white purified sort. But the dried ochre remains left from labor inside. Here, look. All you have to do is

Come in. Clutch

The cold feathered knob. The heart. & you can too. It's so easy you'd think there was a mistake. But no. We choose what defines us with our hands. The simplest tools. Yes—Yes— I once believed this. I too wanted to escape by stepping inside invention. But now, gazing out a train moving north from San Diego, I don't think that was the full truth. To be a soul & see oneself as the branch stem last to bloom, is nothing more than accepting the accident

Of nature.

Like the western bluebird that follows me with machine-speed motionless against my window before vanishing. Or the brown finch which just yesterday, alighted unafraid onto the yellow skin of

My two palms.