Proving Ground

Like a river of death, the yawning abyss sheds its energy, heaves its sediment & meanders remote films of water---shudder of life, this trembling emptiness.

Like interstellar waste, this insensible, yawning abyss rushes the breach & swells the pores absent those who thrive & perish, unnoticed in soil.

Like a spirit upon the deep, a wild universe conceives this empty extreme whereby the faithful isopod beneath a rock is bound for heaven.

Those in despair see only a seething power writhing with obscure passion & not this pore of fatality pregnant with the everlasting.

To those of no sight, it is called the depth of darkness. To those afflicted with the absolute, it is not a lively death, not this absence in sediments, not the increase & waste of the infinite.

Look at how it opens in spring rain & makes a planet! Look at how the rotifers, water bears & nematodes; at the chytridic saprobes & arbuscular mycorrhizas; the potworms, ants, mites & beetles; at the wood lice & earwigs; the roots of grass & tree, their buried seed—look at how they open like starlight in the dark of night; at how they move through the withdrawn absence like the trembling of infant suns.

See how the anguish of an ocean dies in a nascent stream sprung from the terrible mountain.

See how the shudder of Love by this heaving sediment, gathers its energy.