Big Leaf Maples

I like the way the roots of these big leaf maple trees 
muscle up through the ground like mountain ranges, 
some of them with fern moss forests on their slopes.  
I step over them like a god bestriding the earth.  

But when I crane my neck to look up, I see I cannot see 
their crowns, so high are they, and to them I must seem 
a needlessly complicated creature, one who walks  
and thinks and worries and sometimes stops to look. 

And now the roots look like cresting waves or ripples 
over creek rocks, and the path becomes a stream.  
I’m walking upstream, seen by the unseen.  

Emptiness is Not Enough

“Emptiness is not enough,” you said,  
and we all laughed at that, filling the air 
with an ancient human sound.  
Funny how we never think 
of hunter-gatherers laughing, 
but they must have, all that time 
lying around singing and fucking, 
there must have been laughter, too— 
monkey business, Paleolithic slapstick. 
Has anyone studied the evolution 
of laughter, of humor? Probably.  
Is there anything we haven’t studied,  
haven’t dragged into the realm of 
human comprehension? Even  
emptiness: whole books on it,  
many talks, six-week online courses, 
nine-day retreats. Not that we will 
ever know all there is to know  
about the empty knowing that pervades 
all things. Some neuroscientists 
now believe the only way to solve 
“the hard problem of consciousness,” 
how we get from unconscious matter 
to subjective awareness, is by positing 
that all matter is, to one degree or another, 
conscious, and that human consciousness 
is just a scaling up (in some cases  
a scaling down) of the consciousness  
that’s already present in trees and grass, ants 
and antelope. Panpsychism is what such  
a philosophical position is called, a modern  
version of what our distant ancestors 
knew to be true, that everything is alive 
with spirit, intelligence, sacredness.  
Still, one might ask why matter is conscious,  
why is there consciousness at all?  
An unanswerable question, also known 
as a mystery. But why am I saying all this,  
suddenly giving a little lecture on a subject 
I can just barely pretend to almost understand? 
Infinite causes and conditions brought me 
to this moment, who can untangle them?  
Last night, just before sleep, I prayed  
for inspiration, for a poem to be given to me, 
and this is what has arisen from the emptiness,  
the shape my wish has taken. That would be 
one way to explain it. The other ways  
are beyond me.  

JOHN BREHM

John Brehm’s most recent books are No Day at the Beach (poems) and The Dharma of Poetry (essays). A new book of poems, Dharma Talk, is forthcoming from Wisdom Publications in September. He lives in Portland, Oregon. johnbrehmpoet.com.