Root Cap

A Farmer & His Bible

My cats have settled
and sleep in a dark leg of turf
beneath our household trees
where rain, a day ago ran
—efferent ways that ravine
divine effluence
as might a grave one day.

Where my wife goes
there is a well that waters
the sunflower, and a river
that waters the well, and a sea
failing the Son of God.
Out from the soil-swell her flowers
are fatal, aflamed, ascendant, like Jerusalem
in the day of David

Upon the generant hills
my animals crowd a way
in the fragrant rain, and the dogs sing
of flowers to the south, of streams
running deep into the sea.
Beneath an arc of dissembled light
they follow down the seams of covenant
where in my cats dream.

Brother of my heart
has left for the tree-wicks of pine
and the desert air.  His thousand years
have come and gone, and now a thousand more.
God of our wells, God of our seas
when may your lightning
assemble again the insensible degrees
of Promise—of red to violet, to cleave, to fire
to fall these household trees?

Similitude

Inconsistency is the indifference of issue to the efforts of those who are "in keeping" with the preservation of the old & of the congealed.

The new is how the future copulates with the living. A penetration that inflames the conserved & quickens the dead.

Inconsistency is a reception of the poetic resolutely ascending through generations of increase by speculation, anticipation, imagination &  the making of what might be.

Our taxonomies are the history of such inconsistency just as Evolution is the narrative of such poetry.

Coccinellidae hanging from the awn of Hordeum leporinum stayed in the wind by a finger of Homo sapien while an unidentified animal (Caelifera?) crouches upon Bromus secalinus

The Creative Impluse

There is no mastery of the new, therefore no mastery of the flourishing, therefore no mastery of the creative labor, ergo, there is no mastery of the Alive. Such mastery would doom a Shakespeare his fortuitous beauty, or a Tiktaalik her muddy interest, our Last Common Ancestor her blind ambition, or the sun itself this planet speculation. Accidents can be the quickening of insight. The contingent, vague outlines of invention. Vague intuition, the flint & dry grasses that burn away barren understandings. The beauty of others an urge for intimacy which can be the provocation of novel copulations. The desires for what is not known, the fertile egg of our nascent science. Pregnant curiosities, the progenitor of a promiscuous wisdom. Indeterminate dreams & memories the seed bank left by the passing flames. The obscurities of both heart & mind, by an accident of "rain", made to grow out green. Wave their own heady seeds in a sea of wind.

Let penetration & reception be our habits of creation, and press upon these habits the unexpected. Submit them to the rigors of adventure.

 

In Memory Of

There is not much effort in the passing of one year to the next. I go to bed in 2005 and wake in the natal year 2006.  If it were not for the convenience of numbers, maybe we would reckon the sealing-off like a tree---go dormant, and when one quickens again to the good work of creating---well there's a ring formed from prior strife to stiffen the new to any adversity.

Believe me, if there is to be a riot of green, of shoot-worthy growth, of nest building & lustful song above; than below, in the fragrant shade, in the wit & potency of humus, in the incantations of life-endowed dirt---there must be death. Think of it as what we leave ungirded in the annuli of our lives---it becomes the annealing fuse for a new ring as winter gives way, as the Sun strengthens, the Earth warms, and the birds return.

But all the forces at work to bring about a year's harvest of death, cease not.

Like a tree bend honestly against ocean wind; take a virtuous hold of firm earth & resist ruin of the north---but should the will for good work attenuate, the animation of beauty abrade & the desire for adventure drain from every cell, leave us the new year with this certainty: at the center of your death is a Love sealed-off from the destruction that has given birth to it. This Love is what trees dream of in their winter sleep. The sleep that completes the old ring, which begins the power  invoked by a new, great awakening.

This Love is the force of the fruitful---& to be fruitful, is, after all, the Aim of every new year.

 

Perpetual

Movement. 

In Nature, which is Reality thriving, which is what matters most to the living, movement of whatever-- of sickness, of seed, of rainfall, of ritual, of ruin, of all motion wielded by our tireless efforts at understanding--is, by any laboring organism such as a Watershed, or a Rustic, or a Mycelial network, plain & simple Advancement.

Work advances the value inherit to its Aim. (Do your work, and I shall know you.*)

When I walk now in the mornings of infant winter, the heavy dew and adobe soils of my neighbor's ill-kept headlands cling to my boots. In that "gumball" of earth is a world. I, like a sated fox of figs & blackberries, knowingly carry & scatter the promise of new communities along my path. What clings to my boots are  the Royal Subjects of the Kingdoms of  Bacteria, Protoctist, Fungi, Plant & Animal. Indeed, it is not too great an exaggeration to say the muck I move down-wind is our world! In the beginning, creation was forced not from a fist of clay thrown in the wild, but from a pair of farmer's boots set down in this paradise!.

After each act of creation: more time & work. And though it seems we cycle through both (day & night, cultivate & harvest), nothing that endeavors ever returns to its starting out. Even the path of our planet shivers & rocks in its river of space.  Its revolution, a stream-bed in the fashion of infinitesimal whorls, drawing our Wanderer in toward that fiery, corrupting, conceiving Sun.

Advancement conjures adventure,  & adventure, peril. The nascent rootings of clover like the immune system of mammals, must be open to a world of influence--some dangerous, some lethal. Openness of this kind presupposes the ability to Learn-- an ability the Living possess & whose genius guides all purposeful motion.  Without Learning there can be no movement of information, indeed without the ability to learn how could information be?  How could Life anticipate, as it must in a universe of turbulent newness, without the generation of meaning?

The seed, emerging from its  husk, waits for a promising air (or perhaps, the agricole's heel!). Its parents have received the ritualized instructions, learned over the many, many motions of time, to bear an infant able to grasp the value of the laboring wind--and when that wind comes soaring--to take hold! 

There the Adventure begins.

*R. W. Emerson

 

Star(t)lings

Sturnus vulgaris
Their path is arduous as it is dangerous as it is desperate. Birds of prey make it a frenzied path. Sifting ocean currents bedevil it with wind & rain. Perhaps for the many, the increase of spring stir in the great distances that  separate cold from heat, dark from light. Its issue, a promise that may impassion an avian brain. The many, beset by these fevers, pad on. Those left of little desire, gather & die.

There is a place at the end of our ranch, near the roadway where they litter the ground. It is the same year after year: from late October to early December, and only here, upon this one entirely inconspicuous piece of earth,  their paths end. All ecstasies of flight. All the pleasures of the worm.

Cursed they may be by conservationist, by ornithologist and almost universally, by stern farmer, yet are not we the most noxious, invasive of all the clamorous din?  Look at what we have brought to waste & ruin on this great, Green Rind! Indeed, our ire and disgusts for these weeds of the air should haunt us. Trouble our dreams & philosophies.

 

Then Pause

The starlings are gathering now in monumental flocks that can darken the sky. Sometimes their storms of flight look like the crown of a great tree shaking in the wind. They "matter" their migration in a fierce way: sheer numbers confound and even frighten the young falcons that hold back as the black force threatens like a wildfire driven down a wind-crazed canyon. Other animals (like myself & my dogs) stand beneath the magnificent, medusa form,  mouths open and in utter silence.

To Pad

There are all different kinds of paths animals make. Now in middle November, along my path,  lay numerous, small, chalky-white "scat".
Scat, the scattering of digested matter (mostly animal) left by (mostly) migrating shore birds. This is a spotted path, padded again many tens of miles to the south (its interval, entirely of air, though a certain permanence of "signs" below will strike the narrow way).   Even Life seemingly fixed like a tree, (a "scat" of leaves) makes many paths we either forget are there, see past or will never see no matter how we try (think of of your neighborhood shade tree & imagine its entire root system laid bare! and of its fungal symbiont? impossible!).   Indeed, a path by its being thus must exclude much of what a path seeks to be. How is this so? Because a Path is like knowledge: it must content itself with the well trodden while all of Reality grows & grows...