The great chain of being includes
the soul of the fly and American oligarch.
Night music and black thunder.
Indecipherable scribblings in the margins.

There are animalcules and the platypus
taking up their rightful stations.
Dead men spouting fustian badinage.
A bowl of fruit. A psychic's cellars.

To wobble is human, to stumble divine,
the great chain of being
including chicken bones and all-seeing eye.
You're being dragged along —
willingly, unwillingly, it little matters.
You're witness to the universe, a star imploding,
a drunk in a ditch, the victimless crime.
Death is sewing its pretty party dress,
light and water inventing the pear tree,
rain and soil in harmony.

Operas and atrocities are coming with us.
The noble elk and lowly earthworm.
The Glowing Eye and Bow Tie Nebulae.
The broken toy and final Christmas.

“Oh great chain of being” —
it's often been said or read aloud.
With its jazz fusion and cosmophobia.
Its dreadnoughts of disillusionment.
Its twenty-one hells and Maundy Thursdays.
The candy hearts. The iron bedsteads.

There are families at zoos and circuses.
Hydrophobes and animists.
Thigh bones and arrows. Any number of heavens.

There's always some bloodied rag to chew.
There's always a bad joke, a tight squeeze,
a bit of theatre, a red rocket landing
in the snow, a rat set loose in a mausoleum . . . 
I can't keep up with it.

In the storybook of the untold
are salamander-dreams and the shirking horsefly.
Brief interludes of lucid conversation
are followed by long periods of moody silences.
Tommy guns, appleseeds, gunsmiths, pigweed —
it's all being written with a well-versed hand.
Mule trains, cat flaps, boxcars, angels —
everything is happening, 
everything is coming into being.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Universe,
in all its mind-jarring magnificence.
Filled to the brim with allegories, simony, bagels, spars.
Its dancing bears, its cavalcades and carnivals,
its rapturous cadences, its thistles and thorns.
You could speak all your life and not say it all.
You could sleep a thousand years
and never dream your existence into being.

Of course I'm in on it,
the winnowing, the harrowing, the hypothetical 
ever-after that we promise the ill and children.
King Crowbone out of Norway,
he's here too. The guttersnipe.
The symphony's blinding crescendo.

I could write every atom on Earth
and still not be wholly satisfied.
I could list all the corners, describing each molecule,
and not fit it all in — the cosmos's heat death,
the collapse of gravity, light's thankless task.
I could live and die each moment
and not contain you.