This time, section 6 of
the seven-part poem,
Solutions for the End of the World.
Section 1 can be found here.
Section 2 can be found here.
Section 3 can be found here.
Section 4 can be found here.
This is my favorite section. It’s a long one.
I was writing what I thought was the last section of the poem and then, standing in the darkness under the stars, the feathered eel began to whisper into my ear, took me on a strange tour around the globe.
And I wrote it down...
6.
Silence,
Begging for Silence, But…
Maria
has returned to earth.
Goya
flapped into the sky.
Wind batters the screens.
Tree-damaging pests pose ‘devastating’ threat to 40% of US forests.
I wake from a recurring nightmare, body flushed with fear:
a wall of ice
stretched hundreds or thousands of miles in both directions,
on a vast plain of sand, coarse grass.
I am supposed
to meet someone out there…
Insoluble.
Outside:
figures, vague shadows. Cassiopeia, close. Black
hollyhocks move towards me. Dark pinyons pull away.
As
many as 30 to 50 percent of the planet's species may be extinct by 2050…
And the Eel whispers into my ear:
“There is a
short-horned lizard, sharp-scaled, with inter-
connected
shades of brown around a sleepy eye that opens
wide to take
me in, to survey canyons below the White Rim,
absorb the
Green River, while it clings to sandstone, red as
human blood
dried for centuries in the sun…and the rise and
fall of its
ribcage is the breath of the stone beside it, is the
breath of the
tides in Baja, further south. This is your
descendent…This
is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“There is an
old man on the verge of death, or on the
verge of
crying for the first time since childhood, crouching
against the
back wall of a restaurant, smoking, downtown
Des Moines; a
wall that reminds him of his grandmother’s
hands against
his back – how she touched him, prodded
him, protected
him. Where is she now? Two deserts away,
many deaths
away, a place where a darkling beetle crosses
and re-crosses
an empty highway that may or may not lead
to Heaven.
This is your descendent…This is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“There is a
spider-legged columbine, yellow pistil inside
pale blue
petals, that pulls the sphinx moth away from its
affair with
the moon, tongue unfurling down the long spur.
They were once
the same creature, split apart by the moon’s
pull. Now
insect and flower return to their origin, inside each
other, for a
second, tangled meat, building spires of cumulo-
nimbus cloud –
mist on mist, ghost of water rolling onto the
ghost of
water, climbing back towards the crescent moon –
symbiosis of
illusion and reality. Pollen-tongue, wing-sepal,
moon-mouth,
nectar-prey. This is your descendent…This is
your
ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“There is a
white rhinoceros lying on its side, Ol Pejeta, Kenya,
last breath
released, and there is a man who crouches next
to the rhino,
witness to the last breath, heart-broken, his hand
on the ground,
feeling what is there, feeling what is no longer
there. Sorrow
moves in a slow circle around him, and the ghost
of his
loneliness slips into the heart of a woman waiting for a bus
on Boulevard
de Strasbourg, Toulouse, the morning of her first
day of work in
five years. She stretches out on the pavement,
theater for
passing cars, and the earth beneath opens, grateful,
takes her
heart into its mouth. This is your descendent…This
is your
ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“A grey whale
scrapes the ocean floor, ploughs through mud,
filters
amphipods through baleen with a two-ton tongue, filters
the minds of
seven children standing on the sand, Lincoln City,
Oregon. Silt
clouds catch the light and the crystal lattice interprets
the sun –
words from the first earth: silver from the rim of a click
beetle’s
faux-eyes, copper from the hypnotic stare of a cat-faced
spider’s eyes
as it wraps a grasshopper, taking its time – the love
embrace of
predator and prey. The whale blows a cloud of mist
and the
children reach into the sky. Drops land on waves, cupolas
driven into
black water, the place where the water exhales an
osprey, two
ospreys. A feather falls and the children rush forward,
toward the
water, toward the feather. This is your descendent…
This is your
ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“A
black-backed gull just landed near a boy who has just tossed
a beer bottle
against a wall, Hamburg, Germany. His head is
drenched with
cortisol: mornings are sinister, afternoons are
sinister,
night is sinister. He sees things at the corner of his eye:
figures,
trolls, headless mammoths, giant bumblebees from his
dead aunt’s
garden, sonicating pollen off a flower, onto the bee’s
hair.
Bee-noise shifts matter across space! He laughs, says to
the bird:
‘There is blood on your beak. Is it mine?’ This is your
descendent…This
is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“There are
precise mountain shadows on the moon, cat paws
across dust,
imprints of what’s been lost, what can’t be returned;
a child left
behind in an abandoned train station, unable to move,
stuck there
for fifty years wondering why, why won’t they come
back for me?
And the wondering is the wind that moves through
the grass
grown through the cracks in concrete. This is your
descendent…This
is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“There is a
sound, the sound of the sun, how it mimics a chorus
of
white-and-black striped bees, of wings that no one can see
for speed; of
wind that flows liquid from a squadron of flying
squid,
searching for the source of the sun. And there is a woman
in a basket
boat, looking down into the sun on water, off the coast
near Lagi
Village, Bin Thuan Province, who can hear the spin at
the center of
the sun’s reflection, how it desires to hide in skin,
in pine
needles, how it speaks through the antennae of long-horned
beetles hiding
in the dark. This is your descendent…This is your
ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“There is a
reddish-black hollyhock, an underworld flower, on
4th
Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico, rooted between rabbit bone
and moon-dust;
yellow pollen cascades down the petal, burns
like the
center of Andromeda, burns the human heart almost
black, the
heart that is a house perpetually on fire. As the black
gristle turns
to ash, it drifts into the night sky, harvested by sand
wasps, who collect
the particles to feed their young. This is your
descendent…This
is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“There is a
girl standing in front of her sister’s house, staring into
the eyes of a
devil’s flower praying mantis, outskirts of Dar Es
Salaam,
Tanzania. She reaches out and the mantis displays: red,
blue, black,
and purple patterns, trying to distract. She can feel
the insect
taking her in, all of her. She hears the voice inside the
sound of
passing cars, the voice beneath the talk through open
windows, the
voice of wind against wind. How can she hear wind
against wind?
She is suddenly strange to herself – and so discovers
herself for
the first time. This is your descendent…This is your
ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“And there is
a woman, painting in her studio on Chihuahua Street,
Mexico City.
She ushers three Egyptian dog-sphinxes into the world,
the ones who
guard a temple somewhere between here and a star she
named Syrious;
the dog-sphinxes who keep vigil over a black-masked
dancer that
dances something instead of nothing into the world. The
realm of earth
and death rises through the artist’s legs, the realm of sky
and solitude
descends through the crown of her skull, merge in her heart,
give birth to
Andromeda – blue spiral, orange curves around darkness,
and white
light, light that feeds a black hole, the dark-center that sets
all the
galaxy’s stars into their spin. She puts brush to canvas, a cat in
her lap, a cat
on a nearby chair. The ghost of a cat floats above her,
the ghost of a
mammoth floats behind her, the ghost of a coelacanth
looks in the
window, and the ghost of the first kingfisher feather falls
through the
skylight – and she thinks: “Oh look, another strange form
has entered
the world.” This is your descendent…this is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“There are
vicious glass-shard-inspired tentacles of a Portuguese
Man O’ War
shredding the face, neck and shoulders of a boy
swimming in
the Thai Gulf, South China Sea; tentacles that want to
be close, to
find another/themselves in the void; tentacles that leave
him with a
message of fire, of fire and skin, of salt and fire and skin,
of salt and
fire and skin and the future. And he opens his half-blind
eyes on the
stretcher as the nurse dabs his wounds, tells her the exact
moment when
she will die because he now knows the exact moment
he will die.
This is your descendent…this is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“There is a
woman wandering her childhood neighborhood in the
rain,
Jacksonville, Florida, knocking on each door in succession,
leaving before
anyone answers. Soaked clothes cling to her skin,
her nose runs,
her head and hands shake from exposure. She feels
eyes on her
back, eyes from behind glass, in the dark. And there
are also the
eyes of the raindrops reflecting the grey sky; and
there are also
the eyes of the crows folded into a live oak tree
above her,
slow-blinking the day into and out of existence. This
is your
descendent…This is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“There is a
corpse-burner, breaking a skull with a bamboo stick,
scarf wrapped
around his face head against pyre flames, Manikarnika
Ghat,
Varanasi. No one will touch him, this death-tender, smoke-faced,
and so he has
rejected touch. He knows the terrible poem the tourists
refuse to
hear; grease, blood, smell of shit. And
there is an Angler Fish,
ball organ dangling near its mouth, alight, drawing in the curious,
all
the dreams that have sifted down to the bottom, transmitting the death
poem. And there is a bank teller in
Santiago, Chile, who wakes to the
crack of the
skull, smell of burning flesh. She touches her cheek, feels
the bone
beneath, feels the trilobite fossil embedded in the bone. This
is your
descendent…This is your ancestor…”
And the Eel whispers into my
ear:
“There is a
woman holding a juniper torch, resin-lit, scanning cave-
shadows,
waiting for the words in the stone to speak; waiting for the
animals that
speak to her constantly outside the cave to reveal them-
selves, to
name themselves: a horse face, the back of a cave hyena,
a rhino lying
on its side, all speaking through flickering shadows.
She smears
black, red ochre, yellow ochre and white, one into another,
follows the
curves, the seams, and so begins the world. Do you see?
Imagination is
a solid rock wall – how the dream and the fingers and
the stone and
the hyena’s eyes and the lizard heart are intertwined,
inseparable.
Do you see? The vision is a voice, brought to life by
torch shadow,
bound to the flame, bound to her. Do you see? Rock
as dream
incarnate, beginning the world, ending the world. This is
your
descendant…This is your ancestor…”
*******************
 |
| Chauvet Cave |
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