Classic Poem

That chipper
squirrel jumping faultlessly
from one pine to the next
holds hands with ghosts
and with the thirty-odd-thousand Gods forcibly
present in each millimeter of
so urgent a journey
just as willed and as great on one scale as any

undertaken by Mao or Moses
or me, standing here on the sloping driveway
looking obliquely up for no reason whatever
unless it be that this twelve-noon spell
is as it was laid down away back in the beginning of all things
when it was clearly recognized that
animals stand for immortal souls
one and all;

I go down the slope to the
mailbox, and if I
should fail to believe with all my heart that my life
absolutely requires me to do so then
my foot would never reach the concrete.
And so what if it doesn't? One of these days
I'm going to drop dead
on a sidewalk somewhere

and I cannot honestly say I care
much where or when it happens or
who, if anybody, is there to ask, " Is that
his hat? "
Well, let the bodily sweatband dam the gutter's
flux for all it will mean to me,
jumping, as I shall be, more or less faultlessly
to the neighbor, the next tree.