The Tao asks: How can you live with the constant noise of traffic?
What kind of question is that?

Have you ever been in an uncharted cave, say,
or in a simple blond A frame in the crotch of
the high mountains’ conspiracy of mast-tall pines?
Where your breath is a ragged thunder, and your blood music
is its own staggered counterpoint, where the silver whine
of your own eardrums beats at the earth.

All you aching to be alone, take some medicine.

What’s waiting for us out in all that by-yourself
is not the cup of tea in the center of the doily
two lumps no cream of an afternoon,
it’s the raw aching bloody carcass of being alive,
the unpretty becoming that we’ve made highways
and skyscrapers and fashion industries and economics to pave over.

it is no accident that perfection
is the garden of
immaculate white stones
and stately maples
where one and only one thing
is allowed to be wild.