—from The Waking, Theodore Roethke
In last night’s dream, I painted rafters
in a church under construction, my safety rope
too short to secure me to the beams.
When measuring lumber for churches,
our ancestors used the human body as the yardstick:
the width of the thumb—an inch; the space from thumb
to little finger—a span; the distance from toe to heel— a foot.
To measure the Cathedral of the Cosmos, my father taught me a trick: “Imagine a worm inching along a stairway that stretches
from the mud beneath our feet all the way to the farthest star.”
In Pecos, where my father and I lived half a century ago,
there were no streetlights. I remember that moonless night
so bright with stars I could see dad’s teeth.
“When the worm has moved the entire Earth,
one grain at a time, to its new home,
less than a second will have ticked on the clock of infinity.”
The skinny young boy listening to the barrel-chested man
felt sorry for the Sisyphean worm carrying the world on his back
in search of another source of light.
Six decades later, now himself an old man, and traveling
with a daughter of his own, she led him to a cave in New Zealand
whose ceiling, lit by thousands of luminous worms,
glowed like the Pecos sky on a moonless night,
so bright we could see our hands,
the ceiling low enough to touch, the entire heavens
measurable with our fingertips.
For LaMar and Carson Lamb
—
Joe Lamb, founder of the Borneo Project, is a writer, activist, and arborist living in Berkeley, California. His poetry and essays have appeared in Earth Island Journal, The Sun, Caliban, Wind, Orion, Nostos, and other magazines. His work is also included in the anthologies The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology (Robert Bly et al editors), and Veterans of War/Veterans of Peace (Maxine Hong Kingston, editor).
