from decades of looking into
this magnificent creation i have come to see the ocean as something of a big brother who pushes me into more joy than is mortally fair which makes me wonder what does it see when it looks into me?
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we have really done it now
last month we shot a dart into a cute little moon peacefully orbiting its mommy asteroid seven million miles away knocking it silly imagine just having a pleasant star-time day then getting knifed by a sharp blade traveling at fourteen thousand miles an hour all because the science girls and boys tell us this bow and arrow might save us someday they claim to have looked back sixty-six million years when our lush rock got jolted by a six-mile-wide angry piece of broken star [ncoming at forty-five thousand miles an hour releasing the force of a billion hiroshimas a fiery rooster-tail plume of earth rock shot halfway to the moon local temperatures hemorrhaged many times hotter than the sun’s surface fire-storming the mammal-packed forests oceans tsunamied over the land followed by a deep sunless freeze below methane and carbon-soaked skies spiked with sulfuric acid rain leaving a few microbe clusters to struggle we beat the odds evolving out of the spoiled dinosaur-rich soup and poisoned soil to become the new royalty on the rock maybe the creator was so freaked by what had been wrought we were granted a brain capable of deflecting the next random asteroid maybe the science kids are onto something or just maybe some more refined organism will spring forth after our self-created collision with reality hair an unborn rain color
lips a flower-breath festival eyes a double sunset fingers in winter sift firewood ash to rescue spent nails from common burial feet in spring re-search back alleys where hands scavenge rusted bolts broken blades small tangles of wire a whole-body finale upon the strike of midsummer's noon charges its garden armed with a double-handled digger twelve holes later under stinging shower she circles and begins a wait for the new of the next moon at that exact moment by lantern light she feeds in her yearly steel-crumb collection backfills each hole with drooling soil then celebrates with raisins and juicy pitted prunes she nourishes the earth she must because some men have bled its metal out she nurses the earth she must because she must so she reaches a fist out to the night pulling in a positive charge then amused by its sudden gravity in her chest tunnels through her unlit house all the way to the mirror to laugh at the image of a servant who drops to her knees on warm mornings and fingers the globe like a rosary bead First published in January 2022 in Tiny Seed Literary Journal I just now overheard a scholar dismiss all the life in this entire universe as a random occurrence birthed from chaos.
Really? And his rationale for the irrefutable reality and benign complexity of our life-giving earth: “Well, it’s like we’re riding a winning lottery ticket.” Indeed? Then explain to me the unfathomable depth in a human tear. How the one sourcing the tear is in instant communion with every being who has ever cried out in pain or joy. Justify how synchronicity, déjà vu, joie de vivre, and the innate drive to be empathic can be reduced to chemical reactions. Clarify why the new physics is on a mission to de-camouflage the soul of the cosmos. Account for the existence of the word—and pervasiveness of the permanent human infatuation with—soul. Enlighten us how it is possible that existence is a one-in-a-trillion chance when mathematicians have proven that the timeline probability of the evolution of just one simple enzyme found in the human body would take far longer than the known age of the universe. Defend the evolution of the other 75,000 enzymes and how they accidentally work in concert. Use your logic to clarify why there is something rather than nothing. And why you are, rather than why you are not. Now, when you’re exhaustedly emptied of cluttered and circular explanations, sit outside and commune with a star, a pebble, even the air, and reflect honestly upon the trite nature of your arguments. Then, if you dare, set your last remnant of jaded arrogance aside, and you’ll have proven your destiny as a bona fide winner. Indeed. I wish my worn mind would wax morphic
so to slip unnoticed into the tableau of chimpanzees asleep in the trees Or enter a houseful of dogs and know at which corner of the carpet I am welcome to lie I want to fiddle like a cricket in a morphic field surrounded with so much flora I learn each plant’s ultimate mission Or go into bear mind to get wind of the original quirk that led to the very first hibernation I want to sit in the center of a grove of trees and breathe together in prolonged yoga while the stories in their rings enter my vertebrae Or swim for days along the seashore and be force fed by rays and pelicans until my own salty blood trades places with seawater I want to climb a hard mountain to touch the soft sky all to confirm: When I don’t think—I am (This poem first appeared in the Winter 2021 issue of Kosmos Quarterly) |
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