What calls in response.
Consider a cornucopic mind,
tumbling out into its own
collapse
while gestational stars
assemble before first light
in light of other known principles
for living
––challenge, adaptation, change,
and how these forms grow by
call and response, into what will
persist when life is threatened,
and then try to hold some
stable notion of time.
Whose watch
is the reference?
To the morning assembly.
Cat––
Bed, I––
Coffee, I will.
Sink, please help me.
Pillow, will you stay here?
Wonder, find me again in this haze.
Hope, flood through this dark space.
Heart, pay attention, keep watch, and remember.
Head, stop trying to lead and figure. You tend to get in the way.
Feet, hold still while I find the ground. Then get moving and lift me across.
Water, wash my tired eyes, these shadows beneath them.
Pen, carry on and continue to follow these invisible lines, trust the moving hand, however clumsy and dumb, though it keeps dropping the hold.
We are here today––
Begin again each time it loses the thread, and it is always––
We are here today to––
Dearly beloved.
We are gathered here to
meet these beginnings.
And other directional challenges.
If Dali’s thin silver spoon with its offering of arrested time can bend around a dark mass and still hold; if Magritte’s mountain can levitate and Chagall’s village can highlight the illusory nature of common words for direction: above, below, top, bottom––then there really are no end of possibilities for how a given story may move, fictions of today, tomorrow, and yesterday only rooted in the old habits, which are sometimes shorthand for myopia, and we could hardly help ourselves when it was still possible to paint time in a straight line and call it real.
***
Inspired by “Weightless Forms, Gravitational Forces,” Ch. 23 of Leonard Shlain’s Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light.
A mycelium-inspired montage.
Be the hero, we say to one another, of your own life. The logic encourages these rampant proliferating fantasies, each body the focal point of motion. It’s something else to assume a body like a riverbed. One logic trains heroes for noble departures from known worlds across manufactured thresholds, through theme park underworlds and back again, and in the retelling a people can learn to take as given idea of the world as something to travel through––in order to finish on top. It would be another choreography entirely if the crossing in question was over forbidden mountain ranges of the calcified remains that stagnate between the origin of music and the sound of a single voice, bereft of chorus, learning to hear again, a call across hemispheres of knowing, waiting to respond until fully immersed in the dirt, each limb stretching from self into selves into another body entirely, vast and webbed across acres of time, humming Here.
Moving through doors.
What descends through the center of radiance into light so completely that it empties into a well so remote that none in its fabric can emerge, revealing nothing except in absence, as if to humble fledgling presumptions of sight? Shell of unknowing, invisible creatures of the deep, each disappearing body of snow, fold this becoming cortex of time, our next collective memory, already an echo.
When chimera feathers fall.
Guards at the gate confiscating dreams demand our reasons for wrapping them to chests. Why this one? And this? But messengers, like so many winged creatures, are stunted in captivity, and we watched the feathers fall. With those forevers beyond language, how much of our time? Now muted by motion and moved, the assembly of permanent particles dispersed again.
What lives beyond measure.
Our forms in flight evaded all process of proof, and when they came to measure us, we laughed ourselves into vapor, evading capture. We were solid only when we wanted to be. Yes, we danced freely among clouds, but were neither formless or endless, those ideals that only vanity presumes, and we had none when we were running, streams of selves flowing; would you put a river in a jar?
Invoking a beginning.
Speak to me in dreams of living possibilities to
spring from reminiscence of the dead. Return
me to some sight before first syllables, to the
original dawn where we waited together for the
first word to rise, when it was still in you.
Toasting the iceworm.
With snow falling
too much
in some regions
and in others not enough,
a question of what’s next
to
melt
from permafrost
hangs
like a verdict
not yet delivered,
also, certain doubts––related maybe,
about what’s left
to be exposed
about the trajectory
of history
if that’s what
we’re still calling it,
so now seems like as good a time as any
to pay
homage
to the iceworm,
crawling through
glacial snows
and over ice,
eating the red of
sun cups, and melting
when traces of winter
depart. These are not
to be confused
with the army project
of the Cold War, its launch
sites under Greenland ice,
not to be confused with the
great worms
of legend heard
playing
beneath the northern
lights, near
the entry point
***
Inspired by news of the Cordova Iceworm Festival, which begins today.
The U.S. army project referenced above was nicknamed Project Iceworm.
Tracing lines of exile and return, from and to ourselves.
When we first moved into nature, we called it only looking, as with mirrors, but it’s one thing to know this and another to decide to be some deviation from the atmosphere. Ancient builders, considering the return of certain dreams, had sense enough to use the shadows cast by upright poles as tracing lines for temple architecture.
What made the created world less natural than, say, the beehive? On the one hand, maybe it was hubris, but it might have also been the practice of hoarding, to a degree not unlike the mythical cave dragons, those other anomalies.
The question lives in oscillation, tracing celestial lines of sight and we stand, sometimes still as solstices and just as briefly, before pulling back the orbital bodies of our dominion just when they seem to be slipping forever beyond our grasp, and the offerings that follow tend to synchronize with the rise and declination of the countless hidden orbs of shattered once-whole light that some say broke on arrival, leaving a legacy of singular purpose: find it––and this is shrouded, too.
