though not highborn or properly pedigreed,
such pedal adaptation,
tools of venom and sensation
and a master of the velocipede.
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Let us not overlook the mild centipede though not highborn or properly pedigreed, such pedal adaptation, tools of venom and sensation and a master of the velocipede.
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Swimming there, we didn’t note
behind the fish so vivid and diverse a universe of joined consorts, not inert, as we might imagine, had we given them thought. Rough and rocklike we knew, breathing through our tubes, hovering over their abrasion, iconostases hiding eel and lobster in their intricate niches. Each of us was an each. How alien to this colony of tentacles encased in chalky calcium carbonate, hungry too, prey to crown of thorns. It’s not that they snub us. No, not really. Apart from the sunscreen on our skin, they sense us less then we sense them. Is it a political act to sing,
to say, I am still alive, my hope not crushed? to stand with others, like and unlike, to harmonize however poorly, to count the wild rhino brethren, to unlearn the language of the regime for the gestures of mercy and succor, for the strong silence of the sequoia, to join the children huddled in the cubbies (there is a gunman on the lot) to draw ewers of water tainted with lead (there is no anointment) to braid a girl’s hair with a filament of silver (to catch the light) to bake loaves and loaves of bread, let it rise and fill the air with yeasty breath. It is not my job to make the damage beautiful, but I will sing as long as I am alive. Though she was no longer welcome at such family events, Rue followed the aroma of BBQ over the scattered trucks and dolls to the backyard, beelined to the beer and drank. The voices around her slowed to warp and derision, slung streamers graphed the sky; below she was a y-intercept. So when Aunt Grace walked over with a grilled wing on a paper plate, Rue saw it for a symbol and refused, said, “I ate.” When the old woman’s face cinched in upon suspicion, Rue kicked off her flipflops and waded into the kiddie pool. She turned to baby May, saying, “I feel like a zesty little pickle. You ever feel that way?” The kid could barely say a word. Rue had been throttling through the past few days and had thought she might alight, might shake the shadow people here for a minute. But there was her father coming towards her looking even older than Thomas Jefferson. So it was exit, stage left, but where the hell was her other sandal? Water Clock
Who knows where such thinking goes? Even going, it never leaves; it is, as we are, corroborated by echoes. A clepsydra, or water clock shows perceptible time, as blood too perceives where such thinking goes, dilating and contracting, the pulse of those whose inner music achieves a melody corroborated by echoes. From the antediluvian, a present flows meted, wheeled, so it cleaves inexorably to the way such thinking goes. Toricelli measured what everyone knows: time, like water, drains faster than thieves can appropriate temporary echoes. In the interval, when one heartbeat follows another, the buoyed doubter now believes herself unsinking, until she too goes. She is, we are, corroborated by echoes. As if my life were only planting zucchini seeds and rainbow chard, bathing in a tub scented with eucalyptus, reading my friend’s new story on nymphs and loss. I don’t always eat slices of ripe banana in whole milk yogurt, or wonder about the personhood of gorillas. But today it is so. Today, I wear lapis lazuli in my ears and await a signal from my love that it’s time to walk in the woods. He had died of leukemia, Timothy, from 3rd grade, the first I knew a real child could really die. Mrs. Hiltz chalked “condolences” on the blackboard for our cards, a freight train of a word, nothing like “sorry” with its reluctant claim to blame, a locking and unlocking word we could, with something like confidence, write in crayon to the parents of a dead child, and know it would arrive with its formal meaning intact. I didn’t think, nor did our teacher, that 22 cards with their childish scrawl might pain Timothy’s grieving parents or prompt them to wish any of us had been the one so stricken, not their own. I changed my route to pause before their three-story house until I could get myself to cry, the only fitting tribute to a boy I hardly knew. It took an afternoon's duration, but I did it, by staring, open-eyed, at the empty upper windows of the house where a little boy did not, and would not, look out, partly opaque with lace curtains, partly clear, like the vision of a hopeful child. In Hawaii, with its tin roof percussion, the storm shined the mangos and tore fronds from palms, everyone chanting, “it’s come,” “it’s come,” while farther along the earth’s curve, “it’s coming,” “it’s coming”, the newly planted and the dry well, the outdoor dwellers tying down their tarps, the purveyors of prophecy offering hourly inches. I like to think of it as a chandelier of drops draped over us, dynamic in configuration and intensity, refracting light to pure bands of color. The girl asked me if I could explain to her the water cycle as an invitation to intimacy, between kisses, for there is nearly infinite elasticity in water’s forms, mist, river, cloud, torrent, coded by color on the ever-changing chart, and I would lift my face to it, and I would duck my head, and I would shelter through the worst, while wishing myself so wild. Along the path, the first feathered fronds of yarrow sprout,
this year’s lupine lengthen greenly by fresh gopher holes where the cast soil still holds a dark dampness. In every age we’ve walked this cliff-edge, with babies body-slung, clumsy toddlers clutched at the wrist so they not topple, grown jokers skipping and feigning falling from heights sure to end or maim their antics. Beyond in water’s deep teal, whales return from their Mexican wintering, clearing their blowholes with a blast of warm air. Sounds travels well here: the foghorn’s interval defines the jetty, the sealions complain from their leisure on the rock island a distance from this scarp, a gull sheers the sky with its ragged cry. I’ve come today with two young women of my family to make the loop, to stand on the edge of this troubled country, to feel the vertiginous magnetism of the vast undiscovered, to lie amongst the wildflowers, the golden and the milky blue, to try and catch a naked salamander, but not too eagerly, not too disappointed when its lithe form disappears into the spriggy growth. Across the stone, embossed and bas relief: the wingspan of origin, loss, a fossil of chronos, fledged and fleeting, now fixed. Were this ancient creature born millennia hence, the features of its migration might define a different stream, Ago as chapter, Circa as ripple, clock rock of carbon dating. In another time, in another place, excavated for a mine, the trap capture, the snap stratum, the 3D polaroid of petrified flight is cross communication, silent missive via long waiting, via long burial, to the chisel and pick of question, to this thisness from another distant instant, plumed and hollow-boned. |
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