On Overcast Days

On overcast days
when each twig is distinct
against an underbelly sky,
when a tree is a weed
crowding out the others,
thirstily sucking minerals 
up and away,
to feed stone cold life,
to crowd the others out
on another day,
and cars throw up mud
and two people are fighting
at a bus stop –

I know
in the lonely twists
of my gut,
the world I thought I knew,
where I could touch
something
where we knew
one another
and where anyone could love
anything,
is a mirage fading
past the rain.

Then some metaphysical speck
of my mechanical mind
resists:
some strange neurons
stop and listen
against all odds,
small heads tilted to the left
as the sound of protest
works up through the blood
in hot turbulence traveling,
sparking them to flame and fire,
so that I know better:

Thanks to that part of me
I remember a dream:
Two alien purple plants
half anemone, half tree
each alone
on two towering sand-tops facing –
somehow facing without faces –
one another,
long branch arms waving,
greeting, longing to touch.
Unable to touch (of course)
but listing inward,
they create in the space between
a something real
even before the violet
sprouts in the valley.

I believe
anything human, perhaps even
anything animal
or plant, or even
the water, which is moving,
and the always precious stones –
for who is to say
the mountains lean not
away from the wind
but into one another,
great and lumbering shoulders
closer in companionship –
we share this dream.

The wild faith
is manifest
in the ranges,
in the flocks,
in the herds,
in the churches,
in the nations,
in the families we make.
We hold one another,
and we hold this up
as evidence.

But the tangible
is not what matters.
Or rather it is unnecessary
to prove it. The shared dream
is at the root of it all,
the thought is between us,
and, though unfathomable,
it is also
a something real.