If you were sealed inside a box within a box deep in a forest, with no birdsongs, no crickets rubbing legs together, no leaves letting go of mottled branches, you'd still hear the rhythm of your heart. A red tide of beached fish oscillates in sand, copulating beneath a full moon, & we can call this the first rhythm because sex is what nudged the tongue awake & taught the hand to hit drums & embrace reed flutes before they were worked from wood & myth. Up & down, in & out, the piston drives a dream home. Water drips till it sculpts a cup into a slab of stone. At first, no bigger than a thimble, it holds joy, but grows to measure the rhythm of loneliness that melts sugar in tea. There's a season for snakes to shed rainbows on the grass, for locust to chant out of the dunghill. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes is a confirmation the skin sings to hands. The Mantra of spring rain opens the rose & spider lily into shadow, & someone plays the bones till they rise & live again. We know the whole weight depends on small silences we fit outselves into. High heels at daybreak is the saddest refrain If you can see blues in the ocean, light & dark can feel worms ease through a subterranean path beneath each footstep, Baby, you got rhythm.