Indri Song

Like a balloon, they say, when they hear us, as if to be deliberate in dismissal

of the possibility that what is being loosed here is an admonition. They consider

it a mandate to avoid any reference to a common soul, especially the possibility

of some familiar lamentation, they can’t say we are naming ourselves,

renaming ourselves in our own image. They can’t speak

of our ambitions, our undisclosed wishes, our furtive wonder or clandestine

grief. They can no sooner detect these than they can remember

what it was like in the age of the flowering plants when forests

stretched pole to pole and everywhere the shallow seas when we

splashed together, laughing, before the lines of our bodies separated at

the forked branch in the palm of our last common mother, as if to

prophesy some glorious calamity that would make one of us forget

our common womb. What did you think, we call, 

when you noticed we would not live for you in captivity?

One, listening, observes: We are here. Here,

hold.

***

Inspired by a recent New York Times article about singing lemurs in Madagascar.