Concern for Soul Consumes Me

In the northern garden
dwell two tall
catalpa trees.
Their large and heart-
shaped pointy leaves, downy
undersides—soft as fontanelles.
They’ve let the spotted
red-capped woodpecker in.

Form is the polar opposite of chaos,
wrote Roberto B.
I take release from this and that

the dead, he said, yes even the dead
are being developed.
Eventually, by this conception, everyone
will be among the co-
developed dead.

Concern for soul consumes me.
I sit in the northern garden—
in the hazy
shady shape of it
and follow my steady breath—born
as it’s being breathed, it seems. Streaming
so organically,
it can’t be pre-constructed.

Invisible and thin and free,
as baffling as Kafka—
whose rendering of difficult things
was easier for him, it seems to me,
than birthing breath.
Will teachers of any persuasion contravene me?

Not the two catalpa trees.
Not the spotted woodpecker. Not his crimson cap.