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Accidentally,
I don’t believe we made it here
Accidentally, I don’t believe we
made it here
Wherever here we are
Our rocketship all creaky with woodrot
Our tiny teeth aching for calcium
We must have traveled years
to make it this far.
And honey, you still feel delicious
early gray, heading the wrong direction
I’m not sure what put us here
or how fold after fold, the map transmogrified.
I’m lost. A forest should be here,
the grasses, I know it,
grew waist high around me.
Grasses you could live in for days,
whatever you were hiding from.
Is this the same strange place we left
just a couple light years ago?
What’s with all the dead animals?
Who moved my sweet mucky swamp?
We were supposed to end up in a galaxy
heavy with nova, quasars, dwarf stars,
moons entire,
all spiraled with asters, anthereum, algae.
Instead, your lungs seem heavy with dust
my eyelids sting, carry walls of water
I knew that exit was doomed, ignited with
oil as it was.
Ten minutes ago, your beauty was an exploding
mist
My touch lofted your speech into noiseless
space
Where colors, all of them, flashed by
in parallel.
We must have moved so swiftly, brightly
we were invisible
Mistaken for white noise, thunder,
Though we’re certain we were breaking
sound,
bending time, killing fire.
There are only this many words.
We could hold them all, they wouldn’t
weigh twenty pounds.
The vaporous words the counterweight to
others
Like anti-calories: watercress, celery,
watermelon.
Enough of that, honey.
Mmmm. Sip a fine cup of hot, hot, hot
this:
Pretend, graphite, scooping shiver,
REM, sky.
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds.
You remember I said yes and endless and
there.
And by endless I could have meant
this frail body knows how to give
back, knows how to need what it needs.
Hope, die, lure, grow, scream, chew,
release.
In theory, the oxygen you take is gifted
By some earthbound thing gifted
With what you let go. You equal.
But in the release, a body fails.
The final exhale each evening
a settling into dreams that don’t
exist
when we untangle ourselves in the morning.
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(Awake
half the night, half awake all night)
Awake half the night, half awake all night:
delirious, watery half dreams ignited.
Underwater, more fish, more heat, more sound
more everything than I imagined.
Half dream water holds no salt, the sea
water feels exquisite,
replacing skin for skin, until I am luminescent,
wandering
between this sunlit zone, into that zone
where light always
dusks
the blues so green and dark, just titched
with sun,
so walls of it pile up behind my eyes.
Honey, how deep is this?
I am sounding, throwing out line after line,
Hoping to touch that final beautiful Yes
Where the sea floor doesn't remember light
Where even vacuous is distant and bewildering.
All this heavy weight feels bigger than
it is.
I'm electric, a Northern eel
Energy volts detonating from behind my eyes
Until you fall back open, humbled
Longing for more of that hot, hot, hot touch.
Here, I could hang this body upside down
Just for the shock of it, just to sink
through these weights pressing in on me
like your elegant, mighty hands.
I've never swam this far
and it's incredible without light,
the Mid Atlantic Ridge to my left,
a mad Dead Zone to my right,
all these red tides right above my head.
It's a miracle, to find what I don't need:
this air, these wings flapping beside me,
the weight of my skin, now that I'm full
of water.
So much water here, we're always lovely.
No lines appear, nothing floats down to
my knees.
I can't name this color seeping into my
cheeks,
but you can be sure it's blue and luminous,
a sliver of silver here and there, where
I shoot
electricity from my eyes. Who wouldn't want
to feel the charge in the waves? Sense the
charge
as it hits and vibrates up through tail,
fins, crest?
The Dead Zone isn't very deep, so I see
though sight is replacing itself
with these incredible sonic bouncings.
Or it could be colors transforming into
sound,
Vibrations I can feel with my pickled skin.
I think the snow butterfly wants to dance,
delighted he's not ashore, covered with
a rough shell,
doomed to slither pavement. Down here,
he's radiant and weightless, just like us,
honey.
Down here, rotting debris has no smell.
Salt tastes something like twilight, air
This wild, wild ride through this dense
atmosphere
feels like you when you hold me to sleep,
our bodies breathing in unison under blankets
purpled and velveted long before we started
to dream.
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| Slash
and Burn Blueprint
“Man has gone to the moon,
but he hoes not know yet how to make
a flame tree or a birdsong” -President
Houphoeut Boigny, Cote D’Ivoire
We’re sending all
our trees to the moon
Not real trees, no alders or purple hearts
No cherry, no walnut, no fir, no palms.
No I mean the notion of trees, we’re
sending that out
Looking for another somewhere to build.
Flame tree. Burn baby burn.
We’re cutting all the citrus trees
down
all the way up the peninsula.
A nasty canchre sore on my beloved oranges
Who said we shouldn’t take all
we need
A body knows what it needs.
God didn’t make us. We made ourselves
do this,
though we still love the way juice from
an orange licks
down the arm, the way light against the
tree falls in shadows.
The fire holds nothing of your chants
of flight
You said it was okay to peel you away,
piece after piece
leave your knees bare and hob knobbed
among the sawgrass.
Me, I’m no savior.
I’m just looking for a ride.
I want a thick chewy coffee full of orange
syrup,
In a recycled cup, don’t forget
the pulp.
I want to fuck and leave the men, lovely
men
Who rip their chainsaws right through
you.
We all want to fly a hardwood rocket
through the ionosphere
I don’t even know what a flame
tree is.
I’ve seen the men, women come
paint huge red crosses on a full lemon
tree.
And I know we’re saving others
but I’ve never liked hypothetical
responsibility:
kill one to save a million.
Okay, so they need to go.
But they’re all dressed up in their
ruby cross necklaces
and going nowhere. They ought to go dancing.
Just buy me a rocket ship.
We’ll plant a few redwoods, find
a dense tropical forest
to look for insects with no names, insects
the size of oranges
that only we know about
and who are sure to be the best thing
that ever happened to the now so gone
flame tree.
Or maybe there’s some other tree
we can hold onto,
since we’re losing all these lemons.
Even with my wild loud opinions
I’ve been teetering on this aging
cedar fence
a long time. But now, I mean something
And I don’t mean to be here for
an entire century
so I’ve got to get going.
You were going to plant a cathedral in
our backyard
You were laughing up irises in your sleep,
watching houseplants grow outside
And I was shooing away ants, spiders
little strange things that landed in the
pool.
I didn’t ask for houseguests:
crazy ants, ghost ants, fire ants.
But what have I done?
Maybe one of those ants was nameless
and I’ve ruined some balance.
Or have I?
It’s the spiders I regret, though
I’m prone to a lack of regret.
But their sheer energy, the spin they
make
from tree to tree is a close miracle,
isn’t it?
The trees are gods, after all
and a good thunderstorm checks all of
the frenzy
The rushings through these roads plowed
through the swamp and its going, going,
gone soil.
What’s a flame, what's a tree,
what's a flame tree anyway?
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| “And
a Star or Two Beside”
after the Rime of the Ancient Mariner
They will all line up for you,
the lines will all star up for you.
You will line up and become a mass of light
a painful blotch of synergy, a light
a light, and a star or two beside
the largest sun or moon, galaxy
energy string, nebulous, cumulus
partake of us, us, us.
We are the starkeepers
we give and we concede and we call it
love. We know the pain like the oldest child
knows all blame is his, that he is Atlas
the universe on his back, pushing him, driving
him
and a star or two beside. This is all we
know
of stars, we ache and bleed, we are transients
of our galaxies, our unions, we are as strong
as our weakest member, we remember
the hunt and kill, we like the blood
on our hands, we hand things to the world
and it gives us blood, fluids we cannot
contain
and a star or two besides. We fill up
on our emptiness, we call to the world
and we hear our empty womb. We drink
coffee every day and it consumes us.
You are Orion, aren't you?
You are that pause and stretch.
The patterned depth we make of you
is of our own kind, and what right
do we have? We ask for a million of you
to luminate just for us. Orion,
your weighted shoulder could destroy us.
Your weapon awes me, the space you occupy
is as brilliant, as dense as anything I've
ever known,
and I want, I want to be scorched whole.
+ Accidentally,
I don’t believe we made it here
First published
online in the journal storySouth.com
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