Answer to Robison Jeffers
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
– “The Answer” Robinson Jeffers
A delineated and revised poem.
Yes and yes and yes and yes but no, not duped by despair when rock is sometimes bettered by hand and chisel, the sea frozen on an easel. No to inhumanism and post-humanism.
Your own words are proof against strident inhumanity. Without witness stone is silent and the meadow flowers have no names. Rock thought moves too slow to notice their blooms. Stone will never taste the honey or trace the hawks flight across the bouldered slopes.
The poppy and the lupine do not live in the memory of silent granite, but in ours because you stood there on the shoulders of railroads.
“We must [no, not] unhumanize ourselves,” who rose up from that rolling ocean to stride across continents to stand in awe of the hawk. Do not idolize that raptor’s isolation but rather that he knows his place in the hill-shaped winds, kills only what he needs.
We are not the cancers we decanted in laboratories. We are just another measure in the song that birthed your beloved hawks.
If symphonies are within our grasp, let us compose ourselves and find the trails blazed before us by those who cultivated a bounteous wilderness, to understand that man and granite are all star stuff dreaming a world of blue and of green. Yes, “we must uncenter our minds from ourselves” and find
a fulcrum as you did, piling up stones to house your brooding isolation
There is no escape, no place to stand apart on our narrow planetary band of life.If man can find the zero that counts the boundless stars and calculates trajectories thereto then we can rise above the horrors from which you hid. We are animals who lived millenia among countless others, sisters and brothers in the delicate green web.
Well Bottom Blues 
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