Confirmation

A poem of questions and answers

Is that Mt. Hood spearing the heavens or just more cumulus clouds stacked beyond reason? impossible to discern the difference through a hillside of evergreens, their fragmented silhouettes intercut with the honey of sunset.

Even here the hum of highway persists among the solace of tree and stone, plots of grass occupied by random strangers, their dogs, intermittent laughter, the chatter of susurrant conversation, the haggard breaths of joggers traveling like echoes of bird song, the cries of the red tail hawk, the chirps of a chubby squirrel foraging amid the leaves — it’s peaceful, a yoga stretch and deep exhale of the mind, interlocking puzzle pieces of this moment in time, this sonder of overlapping multiverse culminating like a pleasant chill, ripple of gooseflesh from which there is no center.

From there to here, so many blossoms, bright plumes of pink, white, cornflower blue popping like fireworks over the tops of the houses petals floating and flickering with light, explosions of color frozen in full spark, and I wish it would last, but it won’t.

On the hills of this dormant volcano still budding with life, I’ve stared across the reflections of its reservoirs and looked out over the descending valleys where human achievement diminishes from a cityscape to an ant farm, and I have felt anxiety slip away, the only threat being the promise that the universe will keep its secrets hidden, that every beautiful and dangerous thing will reach the same unknowable end unable to reveal its truth back to a world that waits with childish wonder for some kind of confirmation beyond the numbness of these senses, that yes, we exist, and yes, we matter.