If a dictionary is but a mythology of thought
the effort Ezekiel’s taken, must one day be undone
by diffusion of Life Sciences, or selection of skeletal mass
& volume of gray matter, or of other complex vehicles
that bear no resemblance to eye & wheel.
All for naught, the intimacies of God that ravish
the living like a rain received in the ash
of grasslands the wind burns to the ground?
No longer call upon the old way
but cry out its ruination: Death! Death!
the freedom that devastates; entropic
vagueness; the black we mistake--- it wheels & ruts
the path we take; the trail we blaze.
The Web of Life
It will be unmistakable (finally!) when it comes in its careful violence, in its profane ceremony, in its sanctified hunger. The dark touch will satisfy an excess of love.
Generosity demands sacrifice.
The Generous Coyote
If charity is what love becomes when we are dead, than death is where all life goes to give again. We eat love in life, so in death, become its nourishment.
Dirt
Inextricable 1. A circumstance so complex & its relief so opaque, that its resolution mocks the pretensions of illimitable space. 2. An entanglement of such disorder & a unity of so much confusion, that this difficulty is what we mean when we say "the grip of death". 3. A manner of creation; "intricate; exquisitely wrought" be it by force of art or persuasion of the common matter.
"The shedding of sunny entanglements enrich our marine & terrestrial soils. There they commingle with inextricable potential. "
A Winter Tale
Beauty is perfected in the mutable, so why should we abhor the dying animal? Recoil from old age & its companion diseases that bring a monument of life down in a swirl of flies & stench & putrescent flesh? (Or what repulses an aging "boomer" : sagging skin, unfit pate, fat arms & bent backs?)
Shame our soul, this object of eternity?
There has been a lasting sentiment in religious life that recommends we revile the body. Sin acquired through temptation; temptation a consequent of excess desire. The flesh is weak--- we go at it like sops & monkeys. Be free of taint; forbear "pollution" of the natural world. All in an effort to have us believe that what is best in humankind owes its election to a supernatural being. A God who has lent us the spark, the breath, and the word of Righteous Instruction! As the body putrefies, the soul, by some "artifice of eternity", takes to wing & leaves corruption behind forever! (And how this sentiment persists, is perhaps even more onerous in our secular preoccupations with taints of all kind: domestic, racial, gender, class, species to kingdom, & nation-state).
But pollution of the fallen bird matters the divine! Corruption, the fertile ground of beauty. The soil beneath our feet, the supreme expression of an open society--- forever renewed by all the creatures it receives, without prejudice, in their turn toward its wantonness. They lay upon it as we might upon our beds where sleep takes us deep into a common ancestral landscape of pregnant griefs & new-born anticipations.
The welcome we receive in dirt is the intimation of future hope. There our gains in life meet with an unending & ever restless will to create.
The promise of an illuminated freedom lies in the apprehension of organic truths. Truths that grow out of the ground like great oaks. Their vividness is our liberty; their flourishment our instruction; their fruitfulness the means for our love. One such truth lies here before us. The creature that is alive in death; that commingles in nether earth & has much to teach us; she, who will animate the children of the sun, who owe all their love to her--- she, the fallen bird is the divine of Nature. She will renew the burgeoning loam of that which lends us the spark, the breath, & the word of natural instruction.
The atomization of her life in death is what makes for the future.
