Bare

 

Guardsman, take off your uniform.
Priest, take off your chasuble and stole.
Take off your dhoti, swami, and shave your beard.
Take off your high heels, lady of the night,
your silver slippers, princess.
Take off your border security badge,
swim back and forth across the Rio Grande,
rescuing 12-year-old's from exile.
Anarchist, take off your Guy Fawkes mask;
that too is a uniform, a doctrine.
Tear off every stripe, insignia,
every medal of honor or dishonor.
Erase the capital letters after your name.
We are climbing into one burlap sack now,
to be shaken together and spilled out
in no particular order,
nobody first or last.
Then we'll brush our teeth with birch twigs.
We'll harvest mushrooms from the forest floor.
We'll go skinny dipping,
not in the Ganges, not in the Jordon,
but in a freezing alpine stream

whose name is its own underground gurgle,

murmuring down from the white breasted

mothering snow.
And when we're all washed shivering pure,
we'll move like clouds.
We'll sit like mountains.
We'll breathe like rain returning to the sky.
Then we'll disappear
like morning mist from an ancient valley,
rejoicing in our absence,
glad to have been on

the green Earth awhile.