Explain This

Investigating a given scene.

Why fingerprints?

Contemporary conditioning shouts, Identity! and they are pressed like badges, considered essential means of outlining, separating one body from the next. As in, mine and mine alone.

And what for?

The first purpose was holding, and the next was touch. These are the grooves that allow a body to feel in stereo. Following certain lines of perception, one can easily lose the sense of having an end.

Then what?

If these lines begat questions, perhaps they also prompted language, to answer with a beginning, once upon a time. We needed a past to explain ourselves, and some shelter from this wild so readily felt when we stretched our hands over any given scene. One story begat the next, but certain questions were never settled, such as: was the wild coming from or into these fingertips? Either answer begs a question–––

?

–––wait, I’ve strayed again. I only meant to wonder over the discovery that koala prints, being easily mistaken for those of humans, will contaminate a crime scene, which raises certain questions I can’t go into now and for which I lack the language to decipher, about what stories these creatures have had to invent to explain this everywhere, here.

***

Inspired by an overheard discussion about koala fingerprints, with details elaborated in an article I found when I got home. 

Beings of Theory

Contending with a shapeshifter.

Some qualities of some visible bodies

––form, size, weight––are supposed 

to belong to them even when they are

not sensed, by cultivated habits of

mind, creating certain illusions of

fixity. And yet

being has never been sensible––

or, for that matter, some thing,

and so many are terrified by 

its/ not its evasion of form.

An old sleight of hand: make

a thing of what is/not, in order

to pretend control over what

moves too well for naming.

Like a Caul

Thoughts on perception.

Continuous stream in perpetual motion,

no levees until we build. The mind wants

a fixed pattern, some mollusk shell against

the swell. So, we make and remake ourselves,

these others, our tools these numbers,

tests, images, sounds, scents, records

like Remember this. Color me a Milky Way

in turquoise, violet, rust, crimson tides of

possibility, a membrane across

these newborn eyes.