Maybe you're tired of these thresholds.
Maybe you're tired of clinging to the doorjamb like a guest.
Maybe we usher you to just this point,
then swoop up, maybe skirting the sky,
but at any rate leaving you, as always. And who taught us to value flight, if
not the clumsy, earthbound philosophers?
Birds themselves are nonchalant
about the virtues of the sky,
preferring seed or insects to grace,
liking their own techniques to nothing but wings
and bills and dipping tails: blissfully
sufficient bodies, eschewing,
with pure action instead of intent,
the spiritual sky. So you're thinking
you want to cross lines,
enter deeply into a world in reality so shallow it could hardly contain you, like a leafy
closet, or horizontally,
a stratified coffin of rock.
You long for a touch on the arm and a phrase that might introduce you, politely,
to your imagined swirling persona,
a human turning like a slow cyclone
among ferns and drooping orchids.
The forest seems endless, and metaphors
of the heart keep occurring,
organically, of their own accord.
Ropes and hemp mats are scattered in a clearing,
and here and there are signs of exquisite basketry.
Even the clay curls up from the ground,
suggesting vessels. Fleas
and alabaster-colored ants move freely, of their own accord,
among mammals and debris.
A few oddly unmelodic birds
conceal themselves in the trees.
You've entered your imagined cave of nature, peopled
as it is with unfathomable life.
You've created the world, beginning
with light. The sky is finally the limit,
a lit and rounded wall. Remember as we leave you here
that we love you, 
that we forgive you every error, that you
are the specific terror of our generation,
and that we'll always love you,
because nothing can stop you now.

                                                                           John R. Campbell