12
And yet...it was never the Earththat ended, the round verdant globe itself humming with mud and lava, but what we called "earth," meaning the ideal plane of our own existence. In that Realm, its four corners delineated by the rising and setting of the sun, the equinatorial possession, we, as Socrates said moments before his death, nestled in one of the hollows and remembered only the deluge. The Great Flood so haunted our dreams, that that we kept trying to pack up what we could rescue, vacating our Real. For we had forgotten the names of the stars. Like those peasants, our fathers, who hoped to dredge the depths of heaven, we cast a line out, spooling out, into the night sky, and drew up nothing but the skull of a horse, its ancient, antiqued head. But it was only the ancient bodies of the gods wheeling out of sight, and something new, unbearably bright, beginning its heliacal rising. Out in the desert, a Navajo woman is struck by lightning. She begins to glimpse the Rainbow Deities. They visit her. They eat. In the sky over the Hopi reservation, a comet approaches, trailing its shimmering hair, and, among the places of Desolation that we have created upon the earth, sprout the tiny seedlings of unknown species. A deer in Vietnam grows canine teeth and begins to eat meat and to bark like a dog. We do not know what is or becoming. Once, we were planted here by the stars. We were scattered like seeds upon the ground. We are just beginning to open. We are just coming awake. |
Return --
Previous
Issue #11, September, 1999 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.