Either the matter of quantum particles are a useful description of Life or Life is just one of the special circumstances charmed from the mysteries of quantum particles. If the latter, how extraordinary that out of its ephemera of staggering contingencies Life was conjured! If the former, what an equally staggering universe of the animated that we know nothing of! Notions of both forcing into us at heel roots of enchantment rioting the ground beneath our feet .
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What a Root Once Told Me of Love
"In life I have sought (half-blind) for that which may animate the hands of my mind so they may feel
a way. Acquire the manner of vague understandings spirited through the earth by a
nourishing appetite. A considered aimlessness drawn by a hunger
that feeds the seeds of
novelty. From obscure craft, bring forth in the air above, the sensuous fingers of bud-tipped,
anxious twigs, leaning out in woody speculation upon a half-lit,
leafless world. Habits of fruitfulness forced by the keen wit of dirt."
Dirt
Inextricable 1. A circumstance so complex & its relief so opaque, that its resolution mocks the pretensions of illimitable space. 2. An entanglement of such disorder & a unity of so much confusion, that this difficulty is what we mean when we say "the grip of death". 3. A manner of creation; "intricate; exquisitely wrought" be it by force of art or persuasion of the common matter.
"The shedding of sunny entanglements enrich our marine & terrestrial soils. There they commingle with inextricable potential. "
To Bury
I gently lifted her out of the loose soil that litters the mouth of a half-lit tunnel (dug by the furtive gopher) descending into nether regions that are so obscured to human intellect we might well regard them with the same wonder as we do the concealed splendors of the seas of India.
At its shore was she, with others of pregnant import, arrayed in ceremony. Their "laying" of secreted matter (sealing the ring of obligation & confirming the impress of generation) by use of a sharp-tipped ovipositor, withdrawing & penetrating, wave upon wave as if trying to bury old memories. These varying rituals of fruitfulness--- they seem of a sway like tides that seep into swollen rivers struggling to heave the driving rain into some relief. Hers, she frees in a place most of us think is fit only for the dead.
Long legs allow the crane fly to situate a fertile abdomen perpendicular to her place on the planet--- and to see the animal in flight is to be convinced that the living emphasis of her anatomy is Increase. Her gangling legs provide the cranking motion that drives the dual spikes (astride the laying stigma) into the ardent ground. Once a sufficient depth is reached (her abdomen almost vanishing on the down stroke) the piercing aciculae are pinned apart & an egg is "born".
Which is to say "a seed is sown", for if the adult crane fly is the fruit of the tree, the embryo left in the dank cavity is the nascent tip that will grow into a vigorous root. A life perfectly opposed to that of its mother who thrives in light, upon the wing, eating nothing, to this swimmer of the dark, crazed with hunger, feeding largely upon the dead; the many sheddings into waste; castings upon these inscrutable ocean soils. (Called "meadow maggots". Behold their larval posteriors & wonder! They are the spiracle faces of atavistic creatures ploughing the dirt of old brain-depositions, seeking the warmth of thought in the deep creases of sleep, at the extreme edge of primitive memory!)
After male penetration & the discard of semen, which is gathered up into her spermatheca, the sequestering of gametes to their respective reservoirs of seminal receptacle & ovarian crop remains. It is not until she has dug a keen grave, will the egg venture forth, drift dirt-ward through its oviduct into the vagina. Downstream, the vaginal flow adds to its force the tributary flow of the spermatheca that heaves its load of male sex onto the sticky genesis of the bobbing, (irritable in its lack of fertility), rivering egg.
Buried.
Our common conception of the womb is, in this instance, the earth itself. Ovule & sperm fuse but may remain unborn should conditions for embryo development (such as water or temperature) alter. It is conceivable that true birth be stopped up for years. Which is to say that Time tides, and in dormancy may lack the persuasion of rivers. Sometimes all the complexity of birth-matter must wait for an adequate complexity of touch. Mother of earth. That relief of love so one may quicken again to the good works of creating.
That relief of love that is at the heart of our burials.
Out of the Cradle
On a day of troubled dampness & blunted light, the bud wood seems to brood & throw thin shades of irritability onto the ground.
Out in the wind, bobbing & pleading, these unnursed teats of peachfulness.
But as clouds break herd & begin to graze, the sun will suckle & the bee sniff & remember.
