Root Cap

A Farmer & His Bible

My cats have settled
and sleep in a dark leg of turf
beneath our household trees
where rain, a day ago ran
—efferent ways that ravine
divine effluence
as might a grave one day.

Where my wife goes
there is a well that waters
the sunflower, and a river
that waters the well, and a sea
failing the Son of God.
Out from the soil-swell her flowers
are fatal, aflamed, ascendant, like Jerusalem
in the day of David

Upon the generant hills
my animals crowd a way
in the fragrant rain, and the dogs sing
of flowers to the south, of streams
running deep into the sea.
Beneath an arc of dissembled light
they follow down the seams of covenant
where in my cats dream.

Brother of my heart
has left for the tree-wicks of pine
and the desert air.  His thousand years
have come and gone, and now a thousand more.
God of our wells, God of our seas
when may your lightning
assemble again the insensible degrees
of Promise—of red to violet, to cleave, to fire
to fall these household trees?

Similitude

Inconsistency is the indifference of issue to the efforts of those who are "in keeping" with the preservation of the old & of the congealed.

The new is how the future copulates with the living. A penetration that inflames the conserved & quickens the dead.

Inconsistency is a reception of the poetic resolutely ascending through generations of increase by speculation, anticipation, imagination &  the making of what might be.

Our taxonomies are the history of such inconsistency just as Evolution is the narrative of such poetry.

Coccinellidae hanging from the awn of Hordeum leporinum stayed in the wind by a finger of Homo sapien while an unidentified animal (Caelifera?) crouches upon Bromus secalinus

Impress of Pleasure

A ravished anther & a euphoric fly. Beneath those magnificent eyes the satisfactions of a cell, whose sensation, with those of many others engorged with what shall become "unforgettable"--- this perfumed afternoon where love is palatable upon the mandibles; where the adhesive swell of the stigma is steamed in the pungencies of seduction; where heated genitalia spill their fruit for the joy of the fly upon this bloom of cow parsnip; where such feeding shall yoke the nursed eggs of the anticipated even as it provokes remembrances that generate desire; where imperatives of increase incite the splendors of vascular life all about her--- each insectual cell's sensation signed & sorted into a neural space, the "geometry" of which shall collapse into a cipher of the sensual plenum now crowded with the great pleasures only a fly could remember.

Syrphidae upon Heracleum maximum

The Creative Impluse

There is no mastery of the new, therefore no mastery of the flourishing, therefore no mastery of the creative labor, ergo, there is no mastery of the Alive. Such mastery would doom a Shakespeare his fortuitous beauty, or a Tiktaalik her muddy interest, our Last Common Ancestor her blind ambition, or the sun itself this planet speculation. Accidents can be the quickening of insight. The contingent, vague outlines of invention. Vague intuition, the flint & dry grasses that burn away barren understandings. The beauty of others an urge for intimacy which can be the provocation of novel copulations. The desires for what is not known, the fertile egg of our nascent science. Pregnant curiosities, the progenitor of a promiscuous wisdom. Indeterminate dreams & memories the seed bank left by the passing flames. The obscurities of both heart & mind, by an accident of "rain", made to grow out green. Wave their own heady seeds in a sea of wind.

Let penetration & reception be our habits of creation, and press upon these habits the unexpected. Submit them to the rigors of adventure.

 

Where the Dead are Buried

Is Love the fly of increase?
Or issue the egg of Love?

Like a wrested woman
from pupa's head
torn from a dying one
Imago must influence
the maggot she once was.

Blood in her brain.
Fresh blood flushed
from her animal heart.
Blood in her brain

to womb a thought
quick with light
why air is pushed
how earth is brushed aside.

Her women gather
loins swell & shudder
spear the dirt to let life
back into matter?

 

Dirt #2

Let me begin by asserting that our soils are a tremendous source of enchantment.

My Dictionary of Geologic Terms (American Geologic Institute) defines soil as: earth material which has been so modified & acted upon by physical, chemical & biological agents that it will support rooted life. Curious that "rooted-life" is the true metric. And from the Soil Science Society of America: the unconsolidated mineral or organic material on the immediate surface of the earth that serves as a natural medium for the growth of land plants. Gee, why are we being so root-centric? R.J. Huggett's Geoecology comes with this suggestion: soil is rock that has encountered the ecosphere. Certainly more inclusive. But why not just this:  Soil is where ever organisms live & die in or upon earth material. The tree-pit in the union of trunk & limb that helps to flourishes the orchid; the lichen on rock face or fence rail
& even lithotropes (stone-supping bacteria) 100 meters deep. In this sense dirt's key feature is indeed the support of the living (& the fertility of the dead), but not for the importance of plant life alone.

As for the notion of "ecosphere" & its cousin the "biosphere" take your pick. Either essentially means: the vivid presence of Life upon a planet ruled by a benevolent Sun. The former wishes to draw one's attention to the concrescence of biosphere, geosphere & heliosphere; whereas the latter emphasizes the touch-stone of Life as the necessary spark to ignite the animating blaze of the many "ecosystems" that illuminate this Earth.

Since there is evidence of a subterranean microbial biosphere beneath our feet (kilometers deep!), the celebrated diversity of our planet's surface must make room at the table for those communities in the Earth's crust--- and perhaps as forbidding a place as the Earth's "mantle" as well. Temperature & not
depth appears to be the primary limiting factor, and since there are areas of penetration among the large geologic layers--- archipelagos of crust sweeping out into plasticities of mantle, and in turn island chains of mantle bubbling up in the hot & solid core--- Life may have migrated near to the center of it all! What brave new worlds the disciples of island biogeography have before them!

With emphasis upon the ubiquity & immensity of microbial life, a revised taxonomy has been proffered. The "Kingdoms" of Plant, Animal & Fungi are now just three modest branchlets upon the bough of Eukarya, (taxonomists, like soil scientists are still pretty must "plant-centric"--- it really shouldn't be a "bush" but rather a complex of "land-forms" a geologist might study--- then would they be forced to account for the great endeavors of Death; all the shedding of Life that contributes to the selection of canonical DNA). The other two boughs, Bacteria & Archaea, emerging from a matrix of mysterious roots not even studied speculation has done much to identify---perhaps one day scientific inquiry will settle upon the truth that it is the earth itself. No one can say how useful such a scheme shall be in a hundred years, but I imagine that revisions will only continue to reduce the biological importance of multicellular organisms even as "microbes" rise in ascendancy.
With this rise will come a revolution in how we identify & define Life here on this third planet from the sun as well our "dead sibling" the moon and many more of the tribe in our heliosphere and those of a considerable, nay, infinite other.

With time will come a further parring--- but such a whittling as to reveal in the last fine grains the urancestor that began it all?