The remarkable novelty, the almost incomprehensible resourcefulness of our species here in this bristling amplification of a Grant Deed.
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The Last Pipevine
Death in the river bed, upon a gravel bar bloated by a winter flood. On the banks above, across the jagged edge of a vicious drop to water of little hope, the vines that bear the name we know her by. They serpent from the spiked dark of bulrush, coiling about saplings too weak of light to grow out from the oak’s colossus. Fasten to the leaf’s underside, her children wait in their eggs. In her maggot days, she knew of a hunger that burned through green vines. Her blood enflamed with a poison that could drop a crow into the deep. Such a constitution will make her children seem fearless & free.
But we fear. We fear our own. A river whipped by its leash! Ours, a species of determined brutality. A cruel genius that romanticizes liberty in the interest of territory. In the interest of war. Our liberty—a sterile field of extreme privilege & vicious annexation that will make a Europe of the world. This "heartland" & its grim marks of farm property that box the groaning earth as far as the wild monarchs flee. As far as the rumble of car & truck; as far as the thunder of planes.
As far as Deeds of Trust are exchanged.
Our liberty, were it to be constrained for the good of the neglected, for the good of the devestated, for the good of those that die out in our presence, because of our presence, would force upon us a choice: abandon what becomes us in condemnation and find our way back to larger solidarities & planet collaborations, or remain convinced that we are equal to the challenge, that somehow by strength of our reason, of our acumen, that certainty of our ascendancy can make good all we've driven away---most that is gone forever.
We cannot imagine how the former could be effected unless it confer upon those struggling some advantage---unknown are the consequences of our avidity, but as the Earth convulses there will be opportunity. The latter holds out the hope that we can acquire the enlightenment necessary to fundamentally alter our nature & establish a new order of importance. Nothing short of a revolution that will attenuate our social cohesion, enfeeble our forms of governance & virtually gut all our economic endeavors.
Either predicated upon the relief of human liberty. Fancy that. Anyone care to sit at the city gate?
