I.
It must have started somewhere,
this becoming story - - -
out of columns of smoke
or skirts of high tide.
There is no immaculate conception here.
Long ago, sun and water were married, they
made love in a turtle shell rattle. Babies arrived:
land, rainbows, birds, animals, humans.
Grandmother spider ate them all.
II.
Big bang, black holes, so much to begin and end and begin and end and begin.
We see this world as magic ecotone
between Venus and Mars.
Blue green privilege of carbon-based life
rare and precious assumed -
Magi - cal, mutual more door
than privilege blown wide
as a Cyclone
up and up
in helical
path,
to hold
us
in
stunning castrophe & tender dawn.
Give and take, make and break,
such an irascible ecology.
III.
How will the cosmos be invoked and remembered on the face of this place?
Who will sound its glory?
Who will pass along this perfect vision, perfect body, perfect knowledge?
Today, the earth is hot for Dionysus, his brimming grail blinks,
an eye in the storm.
Supper’s on, my friend -- let’s toast the hinds and knuckles bobbing about his greasy bowl!
Then pray palms pounding the table, can arouse the wisdom of Heyoka,
can bait a specter of monkey wrench.
When I look up, I want to thrust a middle finger at the Milky Way
for practice.
IV.
Once there was no time, no gods,
no woman, no man. The sea owned the land.
Along a foamy edge a mare was born. Her name - Eiocha.
Her bright menagerie a constellated a field of dreams
sometimes as cornucopic marvel of calamity,
sometimes as blessing of consilience.
And out of the dreams,
industry - busy and staggering,
case in point: Minerva.
Counterpoint: Aergia, her indolence would grind down hills of manifest destiny
to gravel and sand
corpuscles of rivers
spores of gravity and stars.
There are days, the cosmos has cradled folly like a box of Cracker Jacks,
bruised shins and elbows,
the prize inside.
Look in the mirror, you see what I mean.
V.
Here is a pound of flesh for the peat bogs,
poems as compost,
appreciation for the intransigence of stubby limbs and fins,
a bevy of doves over the Euphrates.
Listen!
Rising with August is a ballad of seven years in silence
pebbled in cicada song - a dog’s age to gather,
a lunation to disseminate
dream breath anthem
VI.
They continue to float fly swim in -
There was once a house where a woman and her man lived. He wandered the north sky - she walked along a southern horizon. She grew pregnant - he drowned in their tears of joy.
Sky Woman delivered us to trouble and sorrow that day.
Coda
All is born
in the lemniscate of story,
the conjuring of root children
crinoids consoling cedars in limestone beds
rapacious asteroids and typhoons
the broad toes of stromatolites
the plunder of old growth
song of eagle bone whistles
the dance of northern lights
a mad riddle for rescue
a red cushion of mother love
a Hungry fire
the falling down
the dingy columns
the sheltering skirts
a lucky break
wise crisis
a question
Each invoked in the telling.
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