Simple Sad Serious Things (Part 5)

Stripped-down primate in a stange-familiar landscape,
what do you feel?
Is it the loin-quiver,
the hormonal shiver of
survivability
(that you could live here
hunt here
simply,
could breathe open space
and in nights around fire
teach your children to whittle wood
teach your mate to live).
That's what you feel?
Then realize
the wishes that came pre-packaged
are a cauldron full of convection currents
and in that abyss things are bound to misfire,
go to entropy.
Silly primate
under earth and sky
which tremble pregnant with your strange-familiar mythologems
but which are just earth and sky
and that birch over there
is just what it is
not Yggrasil the world-tree.
But why does it feel important,
the beholding?
Because it is just what it is.
There's a kind of bond there
it being and you being
right now
and you knowing
you can play with it later.
It's yours beyond words, this birch tree
just like all the cloying memories
that won't stand still before sleep.
Their convection is what gives you
a childhood shot through with a yellow filter
which teases out, somehow, the play
out of the billions of mind moments that came.
So this tree will be remembered
for its particular surprises
not for its dreary sameness with everything.
O primate seeking mate,
still burning that candle behind your eyes,
walk on.
There is this,
and there will be future.

Consider: "Education is what is left after all that has been learnt is forgotten."