Attached to trees
Caterpillar, rest. This is a blinking of the lights, a look beneath the hood of this machine beneath the metal sheen made to mask both barbarism and the wound within the hour of a common cry against its edge. After so long looking, eat the leaves of this knowing tree, spin a temporary shroud to wrap you tight against the ripening of your untried wings, their still untested flight. Behind them, may you sleep once fully through a night.
And substance
Sometimes I think I remember being something like light. How simple that may have been, with nothing to claim, not even memory––waving unfettered across eons of space, all shine and no substance. Mass is another experience, a potential that varies depending on the energy patterns of its particles which move more rapidly in confinement, and the context of their reactions to an outside force, unknown until
until
Between us
The door of some closure swings open and smoke moves through. Here is a time we may recall later if the possibility of recollection remains, marked by this unclear continuity singed and singing, the age of becoming.
And skeletal remains
Considering the stars that are absent in daytime
it is not so strange to find unknown bodies who
unbidden but abiding, come––and the question
of avian flight, its beginnings: from tree-limbs
down or from ground up? The climbers between
branches or the crawlers into them when the front
pair of four limbs become propellers, then wings.
One of the dancers compared her stirring limbs
to the scream against the skeleton that might
become in confinement a gnarled tree. Only
the bird displays a wishbone, that peaking bow
to scissor stratospheric weave and from her history
this question about what is possible before
there are harbors for safe landing of a body
with a head full of sky
From a chasm
When the gods of the golden wars are done
pruning the immortal siege of us I hope to still
call after some bird of the unseen, come, I will
feed you through the yawning lull of an entire
day the wonder of its grace long taboo, a sin
hidden in shadows of imperial gaze, amid
the absolution of the drones, the least among
us long translated to the lesser of two knowns
a third way buried in the blast still calls with
breaking voice Time says to me, o Space I fast
become a body petrified in my eternity and I
admit I am a vapor now, the scent of displaced
selves nosing tracks along scorched earth we fell
to track this body back to knowing you before
that severed joint
Toward another now
At a critical time, the high priests of progress were called in to advise, and it was expected that their minds would point ever forward, that new horizons would be proclaimed sacred and new wine drunk before its time while the sacrifice was made offstage. They did and it was. Aftermaths appeared much later on the new horizon, and eventually the aftermath was now.
Lords of the land
The only problem with that forward gaze was its original intent, to moor a land to an immature idea of the body she cradled while the cradled one, standing just past infancy, assumed dominion before he learned the force of a grown body, bowed––to stunning ignorance––as he kept his shoes on, surveying with proprietary gaze while making speeches, deaf to the winding hymns in currents past his plugged ears and blind to the ancient eyes perched just above, and forgetting the feel of her soils in his hands where once he kneeled.
Beat drop
The fabric that had held us had been thinning for several seasons. When it gave way, the rhythm changed, and we dropped. We had moved into another time, adjacent to the one we had been in. No one said, we are in another time now. It just happened. One layer pulls back, revealing something of an entirely different texture contained within the form. Neither did we ask, are we something else now, too? But of course, we were. As creatures of time, we felt its shifts within us, in our blood attuned to each one, the waves and tides of us, keeping what held us until it did not.
Bodies in time.
While the idols of the hour were blasting libraries to dust, we were driving home from practice with a snack and my daughter was saying, When I die, I would like to be a tree. Then my body will feed the other creatures, and the earth, and everything. Swallowing, I said great idea and we talked like that for the rest of the drive, growing limbs toward clouds, reaching for rain. And talk turned to the cat, Buzz, who was napping in the window when we got home, so we tapped it twice from outside to say hello and then laughed at the face she made back. We took a picture from outside the window and smiled to see her floating inside a reflection of the sky, clouds at her ears. I want Buzz to stay forever, too, my daughter said, and we thought maybe she could be a bird to keep napping on us and coming and going whenever she wants, and we went on like that for a little while more, wondering what we would remember together with our threaded roots and the chorus of the morning making nests in our new ancient flesh.
Into light.
Like the fine dust of the nearest moon,
its footprints to prove that even stone carries
within its stubborn mass the key to lightness.
Like the magnetic field that holds it upright
spinning days and nights against its body.
These sudden leaps against its weight––
these secrets that will not be summoned
––only met.
As the bird and not the feather, unseen
amid glare and muted by noise––nested
by the patient weavers’ nets of threads
to catch the fallen nothings where they
float––
As masked dancers beneath surveillance
states, limbs stretched against compressed
space to tread the arcing thread taut
between the spikes of barbed gates––
And soaring, inside the empty vessel
of my cupped hands lifting
where I reached them up to you
to catch me back, the waters
of this heavy form.
