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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.

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