Skip to main content

Sine Wave on a Slow Stream


i.
A strong
medicine crawls
within this slow sandy
stream. How it settles upon us,
sometimes – complacent as a
digesting diamondback, then petulant
and contrarian as an overtired toddler,
fists balled up against the scurry of fall.
How is this indolent stream not sucked into
service by the mercenary soul of October to
December? With its rustle and tug of lists,
its countless details, each a suitor flirting
for our attention. More fool’s gold for duty.
My Anais Nin flings her confetti of milk
weed feathers, of mica flecks onto a hot
breeze, she is a sister entropy to cicada
song, the sugar of river seduction.
My reptile brain hungry for a
flash of primal spark,
hangs on each
note.
ii.
Was a
time we lead
with a different
attitude, lighter and deft,
how we jibbed and jived – grass,
feather and fur, how we were savage
and bloody consumed, blooming green
and giving. How invisible the blades that
flayed us from skin and essence, the hand
that cradled a robot paradigm, that bullies
our daily communion into digital drudge,
that presses life and breath into a corporate
conscription for five star meals, medical 
commodity, grape picker, housecleaner, 
factory cog, Lolita currency, Golden 
Goose, bottom feeder, bottom line.
The slow river is
laughing at
us.
iii.
Today
I happened to
look up at a moment
in migration and murmuration,
a mosquito massacre of dragonflies
swarming with swallows and swifts, and
breathless, besotted, I couldn't understand
the allegiance to all the gadgets and mental
clutter, the wax wings, when divine fecundity
loves us more. The dark mysteries who minister
and menstruate everything into compost for
restoration. The miracles that bring us
perfectly together and dissolve us
perfectly apart, again and again,
are sine waves or prayer
wheel. Our perpetual
becoming.
iv.
And if we
stretch, we can
touch upon the tenacity 
of spiders, their habit of 
extending miles of themselves
in milky threads, in draglines of 
silk to wave aloft as mandala, netting
morning dew and apricot light and aerial
plankton and our wonderment; gathered in
this snare of today's livelihood, a beloved
poem, seeded in collapse and the wisdom to 
weave again. Below the poem, a slow stream 
braids and rebraids its currents in a dharma 
of deposition and erosion eons deep. And 
in the ebb and flow, ebb and flow of
slow sediments and flighty silk 
squats a paradox often 
mistaken for a rock. 
That which seems 
to disappear,
nevertheless,
is really 
here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend

  Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend And life a faithful pillow - a pillow to go flat, a spirit to drift off,  glaciers to melt and raise the sea. The blueprint is clear - Expect a tiny storm of mercy–  full of crows and bottle flies to debride the corpse,  to tithe the land.      And respect the putrid demise - things that fall apart make space for miracles.   Yet there persists the memory of breath rinsed in lavender and salt air. Then the dreams for blood and semen to revive, to metabolize  every tired, sad gospel into a hatch of octopus. Death confesses everything as she conjures her necrosis, as she feigns redemption, fools us with false devotion. She believes our defiance will set her free.   We must let grief to be the thread and needle to darn the rend, renew the cloth. then we can grasp the nascent green of winter wheat in spring.
Post a Comment
Read more

Covid Journal Entry 14

April 4, 2020 Today’s image – Exploring social cohorts. So, on campus now there is a small village of us living together, the remnants of those in residence this year.   We are an international population: seven from the US, six from Vietnam, five from China,   four from Morocco, one from the DR and two dogs/three cats.   We share four large buildings where we live, take our meals, study and exercise, on a five-acre campus. The rest of the two hundred and sixty or seventy odd community members are sheltering in their homes; some of the teachers and administrators dropping by during the week to work in their offices.   We have had little or no contact with them so far.   Our chef and his crew of two come in by rotation to prepare and serve the daily meals, a maintenance duo tend to the essential tasks and repairs, the city services haul away trash and recycling, the postal service, UPS and FedEx still deliver mail and packages.   It’s Iowa and the gove...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tongue

When I was ten, my dad pot-roasted a cow’s tongue. He brought it to the table on a platter, unsliced, open: a chaise lounge, red and velvet, slip of the lip to swallow us whole. The tongue is a door, a bed of confession, zipper to seal the deal. There is a jade plant on my window sill. Its many tongues sip silent molecules: water vapor, nitrogen, cool pool in the Kalahari. Tongue as cave, as conveyor, as flight of brown bats. Tongue holding space between us, gilded and strong with hope and death - a pocket for everything. Last night a snag of locust blew down over chicken wire. Five hens escaped. The snag, a tongue to freedom, to better pickings, a generous ledge. Sometimes a tongue wags, ungenerous, it keens to ten fingers times twenty dangling over a hand-hewn gunnel. There were children in that boat, fleeing with family over turquoise water. Maybe it was the Mediterranean or cold Aegean Sea - a wide tongue to crac...
Post a Comment
Read more