Category: Wonder

to present yourself

ideas for an educational panel of inquiry

Here’s a talk i am going to give
in theory anyway called
teach like an animal
& its genesis is in understanding
that i failed in my intention
of becoming someone who
knew things well enough
to tell them with authority
the more i look the more
convinced i become that
there is a lie at the center
of the whole idea of knowing
and it is congenital with the myth
of the preeminence of self, and
i want my panel to include
shapeshifting nature &
the pride of ancestors refusing
to be erased, whose voices echo
in the shimmering electric currents
coursing though the cells which
make my body of my mother’s
and the mothers before her.

I grew up reading a single
line about an all-knowing God
on loop, and even this God
said only i am that i am
in response to demands for
explanation but knew how to
show up–for the stutterers
and the dispossessed, the wretched
and the women, who consistently
challenged the important somebodies
when asked for announcements, when
asked to show face, who turned to sashay
away revealing only the back parts
in graceful admonishment of the
asking mouth’s presumption
of being filled in a single
gulp of word and then
done.

acoustic matter

hearing what ripples through here

like the roar of many waters
what thunders through empty space
courses through me when i am least
myself, having lost it all until
the eye blinks from an empty
vessel, waiting

for what reverberates through
each cell across generations
responding to a constant call
ancestral fires shining in the
eyes of newborn suns

& the last cries swallowed
by rising tides of another time
come to surface in the voices
of the daughters who raise
them the silence before their
echo is long, but their sound
is longer

works of repair

before dawn

so often these are opposite to fixing
a way of saying, i will meet you
in the land of grief that we may
put hands in that soil together
& look around
& tend to what grows & also dies
especially the underground
invisibles
while others announce
their comings & goings
with great fanfare between
stints of weeping into the
pools of their own reflections

where meanwhile
we know life here & death
& stay with the work
to make it good.

one response

to the question of how one is being

Now i riverbed, now ocean &
either way am disinclined to point,
tending to erode those points
aimed to find me taking
this skin shirt out for air.

i learn to dress in layers for those
places where everyone seems
eager to use their ready points
& these only make me bleed so
now i am back to being current
again to answer that question
re: the I that I seem, being @
the end of am. I can only say:
I am currently.

Maybe you know this way
& why we never lack for
company, streaming as we
do through here, hearing
communions all day long.

spun

in this space

Since nothing of me holds
in place but my feet on a
flying planet, spinning
i have wondered
where so many could
dismiss with such conviction
so much of this this––us, to call it all
background noise.

My friends glow embryonic spheres
in whispered susurrations and we migrate
along mycelial lines never to arrive
and we are moving all the time.

If my beginning is an empty
space like the origin of every other
and yet each genesis shatters every
omega back into its alpha state
such that my form won’t hold, make me
an opening for sound––
less voice than collective in chorus
not spear but carrier bag
not speech but gathering
display of longing to show
revealing nothing finally
but unceasing attempts
to name where the word
waits for tongue to lift
the earth again
dirt into soil
for breathing.

count them

with bird

What after that wind flies? There goes one harpy. Now another. Repeat. They fall back later, to resume the docile pose of downy chicks in hand, two at a time.

After, one wonders. What this means if you consider the ratio of handheld bird to idea of those remaining in the bush? Look around then, sense a feather of presence. But now is one of those times when counting will not hold so maybe later but who knows. Was now always so hard to number–– or ever?

o bird
o feather
o breath
o time

hold me like the one about to fly
like found feather after bird gone
like opening notes of song almost
remembered.

out on a limb

in retreat

with weakness ever infinite,
surrender is always possible,
even likely.

better to the tree than the crowd,
better to the force of gravity than
the heights of a fool, professing––
anything.

out there, in the beyond, there
is a tree and she holds up the
sky

you can walk to her, extend a foot
to a branch and let her
hold you

suspended, then breathe and look.
how much better this offering
than another needless
sacrifice? you can

stay awhile. you may need to.
let the crowd and the fools
hold forth with the sole of
your foot facing sky

let your head remain grounded
beneath her shade. Extend
a hand, return.

Genesis of the Aftermath

driving beyond destinations

Greybeards cried over end times, but we had already heard a thousand stories of their decimated faith in old books. They remembered birds and beliefs, jungles of lapis blue wings and shelter in canopies of atmosphere, but we had drunk the cartoon blood of salesmen since birth. When it was time to leave, the stink of bodies stuck as we drove west. Power lines drooped a listless watch over dirt lots past signs for Jesus and ATV repairs, fencing miles of chain link. Homes peeled their skins, molting in time with the swing sets and plastic kiddie pools in yards with no children in sight. There were amphibian carcasses and state-prison boomtowns, scrappy sands and chaparral, freight trains snaking through the lowest-down place, through the hottest on record, the world’s tallest flagpole and the largest non-captive reptile ever witnessed, dead in the middle of the road. A mountain bled hearts of paint into the bombing range where plywood signs announced the coming of the last free place. It was cooperation month at the Home of the Jaguars and a Now Open sign at the Cattle Call rodeo dwarfed the elk across the street. Storage was three months free and senior centers waved like sunset pastures while aloe blades took arms against a sea of tumbleweed, rangers looting cash for anybody’s home. Exit here to eat, and we sped our eternal retreat from creatures in suspended animation––T-Rex, mustang, sloth––rusting in space to mock time. Have you seen these? It’s not a metaphor, someone made them to go with the land, each in life-sized mythic proportions. Meanwhile, trains processed a funeral formation from the gypsum plant. ATVs headed to the dunes. Tony from his diner stretched Come Inn cartoon hands, all caps. We would not stop, we swore in silence––not for bags of orange or avocado, not for the super lotto, the loose slots, or the triple live nudes, not for the antique malls, our lives. We dropped over the pass in a riptide of cars, unwilling to pause and unable to leave. Tracing taillights, we colored a sea we meant to reach a place where the ink of dreams spilled into the manifests. Our destiny these miles of surface reflections, unknowable deep. Now cruises come and go from the ports among barking seals touting two-for-one whale watching and we wonder, two whales for one price or two watches for one untold number of whales? Then the beachfront tent cities in the shadows near the cliffs. Behind the fish packing plant, men on bikes haul loads between camps, past children in fountains beneath gulls and Chinooks, banner ads for beer and Cheetahs and Crayola-bright kites, we count butterfly, plane, superheroes beneath the shock and awe of midday sun and every other star another death at high noon, invisible against this postcard blue. Our desert dust still clinging in each crevice, we find cover for the forms we still dare carry, here on these benches near the water somersaulting into memories we call wonder never death and then come questions. First among these is who will wash you now?

*

This piece first appeared in Issue Twelve of Fine Print Press, April 2023

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