On Water and Habitats
Oceans are flowers. I am made fertile in the land of my affliction. Any terrestrial salamander halfway through being an egg will swim away and be aquatic forever if you crack it open and drop it in water, or at least that’s how it was the last time I tried it! And really I have no idea if it works with other land animals with gills halfway through their egg-processes, I mean if you wanted to try branching out from salamanders, plus I’m not saying they’ll all live happily ever after exactly, only that they’ll live at all, though really there’s no guarantee of that aquatically, terrestrially, or any other way about it, and the real question is: If not for the egg-trapped salamanders, where O where would we dragon the spangled light upon the water?
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O the wind blows where it wishes and you can hear the sound of it! Actually, lots of people think hatching living things and naming them are mutually exclusive and as soon as you do the one you’ve killed all possibility of the other, which doesn’t really explain why so-called “worthless” stones in Japanese landscape art are just as important as “worthy” ones, clearly changing the whole meaning of worthless, as a name anyway, but it’s still good to hope it might work for other things too, like the witness of a hand to the shape of whatever it’s holding onto, like if the ocean had always been fresh water instead of saltwater, so would our blood too be fresh!
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Even though we’d still call it blood! And never even know any different, owing to the always obviously, but then there are other stones in other parts of the world altogether where people write “I am but dust and ashes” on the one side of the stone and then, “For my sake, for my sake, the universe was created,” on the other and really it just depends on which side you happen to be on when you come along I guess.
On the Senses Part VII
On the subject of ashes, when Chang Bunker died in 1874, his brother Eng died two hours later on account of their shared circulatory system, even though the initial diagnosis from the autopsy was that he died of fright. Just ask anyone, another way of seeing is by feeling the shake of whatever you’re standing on.
On Forces and Motions
Above all I wish you we! No dancing in Webster’s visual dictionary but you can find dalmania and daman and dandie dinmont in that order, which I guess makes sense from a noun-verb perspective, I mean orienting visuals by things and not actions in action, which would obviously be a very tricky dictionary to write! Like how some choreographers tell their dancers what to do or feel or think, but then others ask them how they do or feel or think in order to answer the first question in the first place, I’m saying the what question. For example, What do you do to flee your own body? starts with a what but is really a how question. What do you break to temper the dying? What flight of legs is always a thing falling?
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Which doesn’t totally explain why horses run around on the tops of their middle fingers, in some kind of desperate raking of the earth, sky, earth, sky, earth! And might actually be a better explanation for how the Fuck you finger became the Fuck you finger, not likely but it’s a theory, I’m saying enacting actions in action, the rest of the hand abandoning their own desperation, clamoring back into the bone with little nubs for the first and third finger, which is more of a what to do or feel or think than a how anyway, so that’s the moral of that story! What do you do to rake against the sky?
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But I mean, all the fastest animals run around on their toes! Not that you should put a ballerina in a 500 meter race, but even for ballerinas the whole hand on the ground or foot on the ground is strictly for stopping or sleeping or falling or dying, to get back to the dying. Loss into the palm, earth into the whole, and everything everything collapsing and flying, not that that explains why all the even-toed animals have horns at the sides of their heads and the odd-toes have none, but I mean not everything has a reason, galloping long into the cup of light, O tell me now what bone hath reaped the soul?
On Why Things Die
The way children know what to do with trees to find their faces, and the trumpet flowers suck in the blue and even your feet are little mountains, and the most human human movement is leaping but not the one done by the dancers who make a mockery of desperation. Agape. Agape. Because you run so sweetly.
On Endings, Generally
Where we sing with our circular faces, and descend from the bluebells! And even now some fleck of protoplasm is forging a whole new animal, and the wind is whistling and blows like a choir! Some people say it’s the very hollowness of Medieval choral music that makes it sound so alive and so that’s why it feels so sacred no matter what you believe or don’t believe about the actual words, Richard Powers says it’s because it reminds us of how short a time we have a body, I guess he means all the wind, but anyway, generally speaking, people tend to fall into two camps about it, the a-capellas-in-the-big empty chamber people and the monophonics.
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Personally, I’m with the monophonics because glee clubs don’t do anything for me not even in a bathtub! And also the single solitary melody sung in unison is the oldest being-alive feeling on earth, just ask the jellyfish, not to dismiss the minor minors, the minor minors are everything! But just that minorness is already part of anything done in unison anyway, as anyone who hides in the earth already knows and cannot stop from knowing, just think of the tree and the potter’s field.
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Not that any of this would be much comfort to the mastodons now! I mean to get back to the oldest being-alive feeling on earth, like the ones they found in Siberia a few years ago after the sled dogs ate them for dinner, which I guess must mean the mastodons are the new sled dogs, and the new sled dogs are the new bluebells, or it could just as well be the other way around, depending on who’s doing the listening, OK, sing on everybody, sing O!
Elizabeth Zuba is the author of two works of poetry, Decoherent The Wing’ed (SplitLevel Texts) and the chapbook May Double as a Whistle (The Song Cave). Her most recent book Frog Pond Splash: Collages by Ray Johnson with Texts by William S. Wilson (Siglio Press) was listed as a New York Times Best Art Book of 2020.
Image: treehugger.com
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Heavy Feather Review 