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
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.
With Time and Space and the Babies.
Time’s madness had its origins in a wrong story, the flaw magnified by the velocity of its spin. We were about to lose him. He was losing himself. His voice broke and its fragments arguing inside him were a constant racket.
Still, it seemed possible that their dissonance might resolve into music, the birth song of a new Adam, wizened by the bitterness of the strange fruit of experience, to taste with less abandon and more care, his assurance of righteousness tempered by the memory of storms that still quaked in his muscles. Any pointing he did now was a movement akin to wing-flutter or ecstatic dance, hand in flight like the feathered messenger of history blown forward by the heat of the accumulated blasts as it looks back with sobering understanding of the danger of the spark that so delighted when it came.
We liked him better this way, the wilding rhythm of him in pulses we could recognize.
“He can play better now,” Space assured us.
“How?” We had reason to doubt.
“Look,” she said, pointing downhill. “No history that justifies those rivers of blood can hold. If that was his organizing principle, he’s better off making less sense.”
It was true. When we laughed, he would not take offense, but would laugh back, singing our new names. He didn’t even think to tame the voices quarreling within him, and because of this they grew fond of his presence, and would sing soft songs to him when he tired of his own chaos.
And then she breathed into us, her eldest daughters, and bathed us in the waters that knew our origins and our future wombs, and it was then that we heard we, becoming.
Study of the world: views from below.
Amidst an immensity too vast for containment, one vessel’s first heresy was division. The sorting into kinds: an exhilarating project for its heroes who were––(un)naturally self-proclaimed. From their abdomens they emitted the substance of webs of significance, and from these spun stories to support conclusions about which were to be marked for life and which for death.
So here we are. And now.
But who, we? And when.
If what is to be done is freedom for all, we move to unwind the choking snake of this original heresy from its tail/tale, to return to the beginning of the Word.
And time in pieces.
The woman we called Space because she held us was talking about how she managed to survive. “Performance, mostly,” she said. We were waiting for Time to get ready, but he was arguing with himself again under his breaths. “I’m no monolith!” he was saying, and then, “Hah! Whatever you say!” Watching himself through splayed fingers: now a bright hope, now gone; now horizon, now barrier, now blank. And what of tomorrow? And tomorrows.
Remember the ancient tragedies.
Careful, hero. You are sometimes too sure. It may be said that your ancient predecessors, the ones you often mock for their backwardness, were in fact possessed of virtues you have yet to learn to recognize, glutted as you are on delusions of progress. These knew at least––or learned to see (sometimes after the eyes were gone) in the (tragic) end––the danger of confusing what would save with what would destroy. They understood that they were understudies to passions, the lead actors preceding their entrances and following their exits––and how none of the worst crimes could have happened unless they were believed to be good. To go on acting anyway, without becoming paralyzed, in full knowledge of blindness, leaning into doubt well enough to hold loves close. For protection, and to protect.
Re-visioning histories.
We returned to touch, to reading texture to see what we could learn about thinking well and by well we meant in a different direction from the killing machines. To the speech of our bodies, to save them––ours, and any others still here.
Leaning in.
Sheltering at the end of the last song, fingers splayed as weather comes but I want to remember radiance and rescue and first this question: what city is this and if I reach for her hand will she know me? If my mind would return to the gapped flesh of my flesh to mend itself, how far until the next note and will there be room enough? Inside us, to hold it.
