Transcendentalists Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Tired, where the hole in the heart buzzes,
And hairy men who tell me they are transcendentalists
Keep going down, down, down, chewing nature food,
As they point out the molasses cataracts,
The steps they take inching the body’s rhythms:
They pass through a hole in my ribs, and say,
“How so.” Muir climbs up one and sleeps on it
On his back, says there is nothing more natural than the
Un-abating love of silly fools. Thoreau, in a lady’s
Sunhat thinks quietly that he should build his house
Right here where the tissue is firmest, the darkening purple,
Beside a lake where day dreams splash like brook,
But Thoreau soon calls the others nearer to him, for
He is in the lead and the darkest down, where there they
Can sense the throbbing of all things pitiful. Here where
There is hardly any light, though above my fingers flutter
Like frightened flocks of silly, featherless birds.
Here is where the dark spume resonates, and they say
Before turning back up never to return, “In these dark woods
We fear to go.”