I Ran Amongst The Trees (Censored) Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I ran amongst the trees today
following the path of a dozen
of my ghosts the uneasy boot prints
of my nostalgia when I daily
inhale these woods, when I go into
them to scream to open up my
wind to $uck in the air between
the pines, to think her name
and to run through the disillusionments
I know you don’t call, I begin to
understand the chaos of the world
on this track, inseparable from
it: we are not above it,
we are but one of the infinity of
incarnations from these woods,
we are like one of these trees
subatomic we are the same material
as the woodpecker-
we go down thinking, we rise
up believing, we are the appendages of
the mother- we cannot be removed
from her- we are a manifestation
of her thought- How come the
Indians knew this and she destroyed them,
creating white men with muskets
and joneses for blood out of her
centennial dreams- we come out of
her conscious while we sleep we
move on her as she turns on that
celestial bed, and each time she
comes awake our personal consciousness
dies- before we moved through
woods, now we are buried in coffins-
returned to her- swallowed up by her,
our manifestation is complete, but her
conscious is infinite, longing, dreaming,
arising, changing, dressing and undressing
on the moment, I run through the woods,
knowing it, knowing she has dreamed me, and
my limitation is that I will die, yet
she will dance forever, she will dream
up her children forever, she will
forget me to birth anew, but I will never
leave her
descending into her my unfulfilled desires
will settle and leave my body-
they will go nowhere they will
vanish- running through the woods,
I recognize this part, and yet
continue my human hunger for the woman
across the country who is yet another manifestation
from the same source; in my dreams and
poems I would have her, I would recreate
the power of the mother, but I am only an
arm, I am only a thought reaching out,
and my only comfort is that very soon
we will return to the same source
under the deep river’s water
under the great earth’s bed
we may lie 1,000 miles apart, but
in this breath, in the dream of her
world, we walked here together
we breathed and rejoiced in our
living in this point in the infiniteness
we saw each other- what a
miracle it is to see another of her
dreams, what a miracle to lie a
hand upon another dream and know your
love for it even when it steps away
from you and is forgotten- in the
nocturnal cycles of the earth, all of her
dreams are forgotten and her dream of
me is like this, fleeting, unreal-
once I am laid down once I am no
more I will have run through the woods
on the same night of the dream I
will have scribbled this in inky
gusts in flashes of awareness the
fish makes coming up- and in my
dream I will have loved her, and
after I go down, another dream will love another.