die before you die,
let the vultures of the air
hover over your body,
buried in the dome of the sky,
touching the horizon
and leaning towards the depths.
climb the solitary ruins,
gather the fragments shored,
let the winds wash over you,
and welcome the rain,
no barrier, no facade. the real
sets into your flesh
and tears at your tendons, it all
falls apart and reassembles. listen,
a warrior without weapon rises,
the wilderness flowers in song at
the ascetic’s sky burial, rising again,
the old city fades, a new city begins.
Category: Poetry
new echota
the land lies blank but for the reconstructed
structures and the young trees lately planted, a few
faint lines of roads shallowly traced. I listen for
the principal people, my eyes closed, but all I hear
are the voices of my children, running over the sod.
why did this happen, they ask me after the park film
is over. I struggle to explain. I do not even myself know
the full why of these things. one day I will correct
the tense of their question, but not today.
when they built the great scar of a road
that runs along the Tennessee, they leveled
a great ancient mound, gashed open its sides and ground down
on its lowest levels, tore out the bones of the ancestors
and wheelbarrowed them to the bank,
dumped them in the river.
tonight I read of the armored bulldozers
working over the dwellings of the dead
in Jabaliya, Shajaiye, no respite even in the grave.
always the present tense. history does not repeat,
it is a long and bloody line, without stopping.
taphonomy
let them dig up my bones laid in a red clay hole,
long centuries later when the world will have made
many more turnings, settled into some other transitory state.
let them take care, take heed of the trees
I instructed my children to plant, and the trees sprung from them,
their loam lying deep over the ground
that gathered me. still let them find me,
let them wonder what was and what may be
through the prism of old bones and scattered words,
they will slowly work their trowels down past the trace of ash
laid over my grave, time’s burnt horizons.
let them sift the soil above me, gather the carbonized seeds
that we scattered and sowed in the sheltering earth. let them
listen to the isotopes plied from my teeth, and trace out the map
in my enamel. watersheds and mountainsides, oxbows and
blue holes, slow turning rivers and hurrying streams
newly born. chart my migrations, decipher the places in my bones.
tell them that I meditated long on my own taphonomy.
and have them then place my bones back
to rest in their slumber, to wait to rise,
keeping the land company until that great and holy day.
gihli digalenvhida
in the distant end
of the smoothsided passageway of dreams
I see ascending the rough stone above
the marked clay floor, turning upward,
the great dog chasing the stars, heavy snout
of charcoal, dark condensed and deep, pointing
beyond himself to the dome of the underground sky awash
in rivercane burning stars. returning and returning,
still I cannot hear, his baying frozen in the limestone.
what does he have up
that world tree growing from the broken
earth up to the mountain above, drinking
of the endless river pouring from the deeps?
I float and turn in the soft mud womb
enclosed in the hard jagged body of the land,
I have passed into it and it into me. I
listen for the baying of the ancient dark dog
chasing the sea of stars century after century on end.
the waters rise to meeting, flow in, and out of dream,
awaiting an awakening, emergence into the light of day,
remembering what waits in the dark.
burned horizons
i.
a white shroud hangs before the mountain, the sun
is wan and thin, ebbing through the particles of ash in air.
burning, burning, the rancid and unbid fruit of harnessed fire.
far off dying trees groan, dry bones splintering.
ii.
they backfilled the vulture-signed enclosure, the raw
phallic stones pushing against earth and sky
and the spatters of blood and beer on the thirsty earth.
rough worked back into the dark with ragged stone.
finality, and they walked away, into days to come.
a conclusion, and a beginning. the barley was nodding
along the spare limestone hills. göbekli tepe slept cthonic.
iii.
and then, grain, and cattle, and
earthen banks and ditched courses cutting the land.
they raised wooden beams to the sky, and wove beams
within beams and so dwelt above the earth, suspended,
houses circling a vast inner space. across the widening water,
in cursus limning holy spaces, others raised
timber to mark the ways, precincts of some rare power.
and then—when their time was come, when the cycles
of the stars and the cattle’s births and the grain’s rising
were meet and right and the signs were set,
solemnly they set their worked woods alight.
burnt house horizons along the southern
steppes, great flames licking at the skies,
smoke as of incense rising, a kenning of the limits
against which they had pushed, a need to start anew.
the isles’ timbered precincts, too, they burned clean to ground,
only ash and charcoal remaining. as a burnt sacrifice, maybe,
a searching memory of the garden lost, of ways
not taken. what is most immediate and close, cannot
in this world last forever. we must let go in offering.
hall and enclosure, consigned to the fire, works as of ash.
iv.
what did those neolithic delvers and woodturners know,
that we do not? what biting ghosts and bitter demons
did they stay with their fiery forced obsolescence?
what acts of propitiation and doxology did they summon,
in the setting alight of shape and form, a stop, and a release.
I wonder as I watch the smoke hang motionless on
lookout mountain, drifted down from our new burnt horizons,
on a world fast burning, without ritual or guide. perhaps it is
time then to backfill our own sharp clawed monuments,
and to let the old timbered frames give way to new,
to see what will grow in the unhallowed ruins.
meditations at the K-Pg Boundary, Wahalak, Mississippi
the earth here is an unclosing wound, sedimented silence opening into
stomata gasping old air, the churn of a matrix of memory and bone.
see, in these hands, these eyes, and the strange curve of my thumb
the broken lilt of the words on my tongue and in my head, grasping and wrestling,
the flow and the give, shame and fear, and love, heady and heaving.
continents push and pull and spread, passive margins grow thicker.
repressed and repressing, geological strata come out stark and naked
layed and layered out flat and falling under the same sun, ancient oyster beds,
the lively ancient ooze of life hardened into a blistered substrate.
graves sink into the soft earth, cedars embrace, shadow, shadow, the dark blood
in our veins and coursing over the hard chalk undrunk, settling into
the lowest places. rich, and thick with snakes, the same venom runs in me.
they’ll lay me low in under the overlapping boundaries, thin lines etched
in everything, you cannot escape. there is no escape, even in death,
taphonomic processes come for you too. everything passes on, and everything
passes. sins of your mothers and fathers, tektites embedded in the stone,
the long slow and sudden inevitability of process and time.
for the vultures of Chattanooga Valley
circling up the rising thermals off the mountain’s ancient slopes,
the vertical frozen march of time’s looming flows, river deltas
hardened into stone ramparts, jagged edged, heating the air overhead
in the patchwork of gray and blue coming and going under the sun,
the vultures, color of the play of dark and light, rise and circle, circle,
metaphor and thing signified, they loop and loop, eyes
wide and bright and focused, the days and nights together flow
into knowledge, wisdom’s course in creatures of carrion,
bound in their gyres to the circle of making and remaking, life—
dying and eating, things final, forever, and always becoming.
to the black old trees they return in silent knowing communion,
unhooded and free, custodians of the dead, unsung and unsinging,
time’s arrow and time’s cycle both they bear, providential care,
they roost over the flooded valley bottom, and watch for winter’s end.
the life of St. Sozon: a retelling
his oratory the high wide lands, stone and thin soil in
the broad neolithic scape, scrubbed and sky dried.
the heavens were closer there, thinner air, a world’s distance
from the city-god drenched plain hard by
the corrupting sea, the malarial reaches of power.
in hand his shepherd’s crook, passed down
from one hand to another a thousand generations,
memory accumulating like the mounded tepes,
lately transformed into a cruciform shape.
so he spoke to his God,
reading the words of the holy Book in the land,
his flock spread out before him—wisdom! let us attend.
he wept that he could not be
more akin to the creatures under his care,
heart burning with the great merciful weight of things.
closing his eyes under the sheltering tree,
Sozon the friend of God looked
inward, was shown what would come to be:
a martyr’s death awful to the telling, and
a holy spring welling up at his feet, for the ages,
watering the earth with his blood and with water.
his spirit spread into the dolomitic cracks,
up surged the water cold, mixed with blessing.
dream and the mothering earth’s pure drink,
portal and vision and life,
the Cross tossed in the charging waters.
he picked up his shepherd’s crook and set out.
down from his hard and rough untilled garden,
leaving his sheep in the care of another,
down to the city and its viscous charms,
exquisite violence and offal piles.
up against the vain rage
he came, and with his staff struck down
the graven gold in the thronging temple,
burst it into a thousand pieces,
a fine loot and bold, gathered up,
and gave it to the city’s poor. the roman concreted
places rang out with the challenge, and the answer
was iron against flesh, the singe of the sword, and then
death upon a tree.
still blood lusting and even more so full of fear,
they dragged his holy flesh out to the edge of the city,
lit a fire, in unknowing sign of the cataclysm to come,
but the sky mocked them, the elements
overpowered the small weak weaponed men,
storm washed over them and washed out their flame.
time and distance condensed in him,
the heavens stayed their small fires, a greater flame
burned still in his several parts, hot and holy.
water, and blood, and the venerable body marked
with the pain and the dislocation, set to earth,
and still he shepherds us, drawn from the old soil,
cut from the new cloth of salvation, old wine
mingled with the new. Blessed Sozon,
pray God for us, send us out from the unabiding city,
and lay your staff against the idols yet.
the wild old lands wait a returning.
two days at the end of summer
two days of watching things fall,
the organizing markers in the substrate of my memory:
one was blue sky bright and clear, a fine day,
the first tips of autumn in the air,
the pines before our house were calm and unknowing.
the television billowed with the smoke and time stopped.
an exchange of horror with the postman, I remember,
the day lapse into stunned silence, collapsing
towers on an endless loop, bodies falling. we
could almost smell the smoke and breathe the dust.
everything tasted acrid, our false innocence
expiring under the towers’ broken beams.
the other was not blue sky and bright except in the central
moment as the eye passed over. it was looked for,
but we were not prepared, we did not yet know what
true power looked like, what it meant for everything to stop.
the pines moved in slow splintering rhythm with the skies,
twisting and cracking and bleeding into the driving rain
first the television went,
then the phones,
finally, the radio fell silent, the great tower on the ridge south
crumpled, the cables snapped. silence descended.
trees and towers falling, bodies swallowed up in the waters.
in the heat and decay afterward great insect swarms
moved upon the face of the riven earth, and
the sky was blue and clear and merciless.
a memento mori for the anthropocene
close your eyes and collect your heart,
feel the pricks and pains and discomforts of your body
the touch of your machine made clothes, smell far distant
the sweat of the Bangladeshi worker, straighten your spine,
breathe the heavy air. eyes now open,
direct your gaze at the concrete before you,
look for a breath and a half.
eyes shut, review the landscape in your heart:
sidewalk and building, road and powerlines, trees
rooted under the asphalt, straining. move the clock forward,
see the years pass, new oceans soon lapping at less distant shores,
the asphalt cracks, the sparrows take to the fields,
every edifice totters, o bring us the little foxes,
your body and your civilization a-mouldering in the grave,
tattered powerlines flying in the wind
rags tied at an unholy tomb.
these trees tumble, rot, and new trees grow,
the foxes remain but the vineyard is gone,
and muscadines tangle the new trees.
feel your bones and the built up bones of this world below
crumble to dust, taste the death dew heavy,
let your heart feel I and all my works will perish.
still the new trees grow
Thicket & Thorp 