Simple Sad Serious Things (Part 3)

Also, I must tell you
I'm a stranger even here
where the nature walk is supposed to resonate
with the stirrings of millions of primate years.
Deciduous trees, somewhat sinister
stand like lines of accusing martinets.
I'm the first generation in this landscape
looking forward
and scorning that land
where my sinews were sewn to my bones,
only touched by my ancestors for 1400 years anyway
for when you know your history
you know where it disappears
into some rolling Eurasian plain,
and before that we only have
the Jackson Pollock pattern
of human migrations
and earlier ones too
of hominins with Latin names
fleeing volcanoes or predators
it never mattered. Anyway,
heroism is written by those
who do in fact live
so it kind of moves
in a tight vicious circle.
But I try to drop all that,
all that "abstraction"
and live in the seriousness of weight,
substance holding up my legs,
the pain in my chest
and the frisson down my back,
the warmth of my mourning beard
under the stratus sky
the colour of irrelevance.
I should focus on the enterprising
creeping of the moss on the rocks
and the breathing of the world's distance.
That's supposed to soothe me,
supposed to make me a burrow in this cold ground
and blanket me for dreams half-remembered
so I can recall the meanings of words like
communion
(the escapist instinct of the scorned)
or ekstasis
(the rush of flying on wax wings
too close to the sun).
But instead
the word-of-the-day impulse,
will only deliver up Anglo-Saxon words,
words of weight and heft and dirt caked under fingernails,
words for washing up and wandering off.

Consider: "Even a hunter cannot kill a bird which flies to him for refuge."