Entry for February 5th, 1798.

Wordsworth walks

to Stowey with Coleridge. She observes

some trees putting up red shoots.

                   And then, innocently, she signs off:

Query—What trees are they?.

In twelfth-grade philosophy class

you visited a Buddhist temple, somewhere

out Springvale way. One of the monks

—the Venerable someone—spoke
of the Buddha, of the Middle Way, and of monastic

life in the Melbourne surburbs: alms bowls

filled with chips from the chicken shop

or those wafer biscuit straws.

Two centuries after Wordsworth

comes Gary Snyder, who takes nature and boils it down

to Mother Metonymy: learn the flowers. 
Learn them for your grandchildren, whose

nature is not the enclosure, but the enclosed.
Only by learning the flowers

may we invert the inversion, and live

to usher in the 22nd

It’s normal in art to laud

prolepses of woe. We hunger for them

because determinism—if we

conceive of will as external-bearing 
(not like sea eagle or rat

might a parasite, but fully integrated

with rill and feldspar, orchid beds)—

is the nightmare proven true.
It’s true, we know it, we get on.

Dorothy might have learnt the name.

But who knows? That’s not crucial

to know. What’s crucial 
is to arrange our conjecture

into clusters, figure those clusters as newborn

dogs, crazed for milk—

one swollen place to get it.
And no birds sing. You must change your life.

I have wasted my life. Learn the flowers.

Query—What trees are they?

At session’s end, you walked out astonished

how crazy, how dismal

the monks looked: their bald heads,

red togas, dumb alms bowls.

Notice how Snyder—a white monk, a man of influence

in the Buddha’s mission West—seems

to convert, almost precisely, the much older

query—blinder, too, as Wordsworth 
cannot have known how loaded those five words, one m-dash and one question mark 
would grow—into imperative,

a call to arms. Much as Wright answers

Rilke in converse fashion:

wastes, does not change, his life.

Flowers. The number you know by name

at sighting, roughly equal

to the number of times you’ve entered

houses of worship. Catholic churches, for instance:
Once for a second cousin’s wedding.

Once for your nonna’s funeral.

Once to see Gaudi’s handiwork

which happened to involve a cathedral.

You butchered Joy to the World on the bells once.

Most dismal of all: their hairy

white skin. You called them dumb

to their faces, your teacher

at reception giving the class’s alms.

It is, in other words, you

and your like must learn.

But you won’t, cant.

You’re in your own way. 
That’s how it is with knowledge

as with seed: worthless to sow out of season,

on bad ratios of sunlight, water, nitrogen

and whatever else (you could kill a weed
with your brand of care) if

the thing is to take up as a living,

breathing, fruiting, perhaps

flowering enterprise.

Learning the flowers takes time.

Time, patience, tenderness, the fortitude

to linger somewhere

long enough to understand
(stay together/learn the flowers/go light).
Groping almost in the dark

as to your ancestry, beyond Australia

the land holding no significance,

all long-held attachments to place 
having been sacked to make do, you

could never engage in

rites of faith called old-

ways, of a people.
And yet, you are the absolute

incipience of the last cycle

of indigeneity:

indigeneity to the planet Earth 
and therefore of what names beam down

to the natives as life-giving.

With no prospect of learning

to know a tulip

when you see one, however, what does it matter?

What do you know?

Whose graves are you digging?

But there may be a lifeline.

Convert Snyder’s meadow,

Wordsworth’s tree into a budding grove

of trademarks. Cars, for example.                    
And the teat swells.

You can describe make, model, year, even name

of paint (Gunmetal Grey a favourite).

You have learnt every flower

taught you by the elders. 
You are all the dearest

catalogues learned to the letter,

the seed. You project, you dog,

the history of the future.
Imagine—if everyone but you

were to perish from ignorance

tomorrow, you could recreate it all

from memory, like Koori elders

the Dreaming. This you know.