Root Cap

Dust & Wind

We mistake our insignificance for the immensity of a universe. There is no creation that would disdain us as increase as there is no increase but what is born so slight it bears upon our dreams. Our becoming is almost the perfect incremental—be it the shimmering cooperation of an electron, or the congress of dust & gas & cold chaos. It is what each of us needs to find the future. But having been is what makes us understand. Its remembrances provide us not only a "sense" of direction, but a sense of just how immense it really all is!

The seed left with the wind. The wind that changes everything. The seed fell from the wind. It was covered with dirt so it might cover the earth & change everything. What is there that will not ravish the wind?

M. Fly

Intimate Splendor

Companions are the fundamental unit in the metrics of universal solidarity. They are the means of intimacy & why we copulate. Source of the symbiosis that make us organisms. They are the entities of our adventures. For whose benefit we create. They are the way we seek ourselves because companions incite
understanding. They are the path that people the way through conflict--- the fundamental people of peace. In a world where life is the purpose of learning, and learning is how love labors, companions are the agents of love’s instruction. They may waste like a river & rot into dirt. They may ruin with age & make us anxious of death--- but they are there at our birth and all through our lives they surround us & make us endeavor the world.

Righteous Violence & The Failed State of Nature

The several hundred acres of life that managed to stay hid as "fallow ground", is gone. The ground will remain fallow (no "farming" is anticipated for years), but its is now distressed ground. Harrow ground. Whipped-by-its-leash ground.

Gone are the all the grasses; all the herbaceous flowerings; all the many, many spiders; all the many flies; gophers, field mice & voles; gone are the merlins, the kestrels, the kites, the hawks;  gone the skippers & butterflies; gone the jack-rabbit & bush bunny; gone the red wing black bird, the quail, the starling, the robin & swallow; gone the gopher snakes & garters & kings & rattlers; gone the hurrying lizard; gone the many species of beetles; gone the crickets, gone the lacewings; gone the grasshoppers, the leaf hoppers; gone the great blue herons; gone the barn owl, gone the great horned owl; gone the ground squirrel, the red squirrel; gone the bob cat, gone the coyote.  Gone the satisfaction of the sun and how our planet endeavors.

The many, many more we cannot name because we do not know—they too are gone. Gone is the path. Gone is the expectation. Gone the intimate splendor. Gone the surprise. Gone the companions!

Gone the companions! Gone.

The Whipping

The anonymity makes its possible for us to turn away, justified.

We learn not to understand.

The Leash

The remarkable novelty, the almost incomprehensible resourcefulness of our species here in this bristling amplification of a Grant Deed.

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?

Honest

there is something
to be said
about all that goes
unsaid
between those who can
and those who can’t
that what is meant
is certainly the sense
of what is never said

should we (who can)
say what we mean but not
intend,

            (our intent:
senselessness;
void of insight
disease of weariness
lack of all animal
satisfaction)

than what we mean
is not the sense
and those who can’t
(never fooled), are quick
to understand
our woeful predicament

 

The Nose Knows

we should each
make a spot
in our lives
that stinks of Plato
gather round
that pillar of air
---odor
of immutability---
and let go like a dog
mark the smell
like one wise to the dead
loaf & live
for that telling
breeze

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

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?