Root Cap

Walking With Parmenides

Not changes nothing in that everything may perish.

In the nature of things it must be as if nothing is—a not
ever present like a horizon that flees a two-headed approach
(or does it beckon?)—every not the thought of nothing
& every not the brazen lock that restrains a thought
try & think the sustaining-plot of the deathless
where nothing becomes (not its garden)
& nothing nourishes—soils that bear showers beneath
& a show of light or urge that grows a place of not
where souls bear forth with a restless dark (all about
an absent star cannot this a cold universe extinguish!)
—all that we mean by the fullness of not
(that makes us shift place & exchange bright color)
—the perishing always holding-on to an approach
—this everlasting that comes from a beginning to end.

A god is not that changes nothing.

It must be that what is there for speaking & thinking of is; for it is there to be, whereas nothing is not; that is what I bid you consider   (Fragment 6)

awake!

in sleep we give up the power to root
touching those who have abandon the strength to surrender
there, where the power of spring gives up to the sleepless who in us awake 
a need to yield

an alarmed millipede

Rain

if heaven will attend earth, even ocean dirt will care for the perished
if not, not even the dark will care for those who smell like the deathless
—for a star broadcasts what grass will gather which is to say
a seed is how god matters

Creatures

how can the deathless live without it? a bird only by what a star endeavors
each a strenuous last flight through the dark—like starlight a nest of eggs untended reeks with immortality.

wintertime

among the dead death is the way to get born just as birth
death among their progenitors; for a god a womb—those
who never can in an embryo

springtime

sex is the setting apart of what is sown
but if only a god can sex the dark what is it
she sets apart? an attraction that grows a sun