From past, until––
Sing in us a song to unwrite what has been overwrought onto the bodies of earthly creatures, their backs and faces, beds and nests, limbs and soils, eyes and the marrow of mountains, each vessel to overflow with what floods between seen and unseen, light to lift the lies from torn pages of official record. Resound.
The loose thread.
And yet, this persists: the force of dew to still doubt while stirring a whispered belief in the power of a single song to call up the sun.
Off the record.
Generosities of language emerge as dusk settles, erupting in dialects more prone to dismissing the manners of a given day. The shock of voices startled into screams, and the lingering pause that attends each, an unofficial record of anguish––which is, in its raw form, consistently resistant to official record.
And the proper care and handling of what lives.
Into nature’s wordless sorrow, the naming tongue limps in abstraction, not to notice shadow of bruise across face or subtle song but into a deluge of earlier questions condensed at altitude to rain theories of endings, too many to count.
And collective.
The words were what was happening to us, lapping and lolling their tides. The shock of being enmeshed in a work of art. If someone had asked what my life was then, one answer would be: anywhere but this body. Another: any felt where beyond its limits––both of which, I see now, would have betrayed certain narrow assumptions about the limits of a given form.
What makes a world what it is?
As the bees
as the sea star
the snowshoe hare
aspen
willow––you define
as the saguaro
as the tortoise
as the shark––a world
so thoroughly
that it without
the tiger
you
the coral
the hummingbird
would not
exist
as so many
still
unnamed
In winter.
May wind seed a lullaby to dive us from this race and faces fall from ourselves and their constant choreography into another current, its fluid wing of night bird, to sing the hour’s next beginning.
Records of conquest.
Once, amid covenant of salt and lamps to burn every evening through quiet, into dark, one had the idea to cut the groves. He suggested this to others. He knew what vanities to stoke, whose appetites were violent enough to take pleasure in the raid, as though doing so would bring a final calm, an end to the torment of those despairs and passions that would strike at midday and midnight.
But what followed were empty pleasures, and now these hungers were of greater volume. From there, they built the walled cities and armies of men to protect them, and these grew notions of valor that were married to the work of weapons and attendant armors, of seizing and attendant claims, might and its supporting rights. With these, they enacted many plunders; called these Victory, claimed them Saving, recorded as the Project of Civilization.
There was much claiming in those days, of the spoils of war. Over time it became unfashionable to call out the spoils; stating the obvious was something only a dullard would do. But the claim of the owners was birthed in violence when they ran off with the sheep, and when the salt loses its flavor over time, who remembers those first trees?
Penelope’s labor.
At the place of undoing
the weave of story lifts
from its loom by her hand,
time undone. Becoming
something outside it
all.
And creator.
It lives
by the distraction
it makes
before it dies
at the insides
only to emerge
as task: one sole
task given me
out of time.
Here I am again
afraid of running
to enact the small
body of infinite
infinitesimal
purpose given
to each, a creature
alive, scratching
for release
from suffocation
by a world yet
to know how
it breathes.
