Root Cap

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 for our desire. 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grass & tree, their buried seed—look at how they open like starlight in the dark of night; at how they move through the withdrawn absence like the trembling of infant suns.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.

Ignorance & Error

I know the issue for I have sucked promise from the face of it. I have mingled my freedom with Fluvellin & become amorous. I have become vague by the indeterminacy of Pig Thistle. I am listing toward ruin in the waste of things I know of only in their flourishing. Therefore hopeful as I contemplate the ejaculation of a sun that excites the north wind, stirring the dark where rivers die; a dark that drowns Diptera in the dust the old leave behind; that makes "dirt" the flies of heaven. I am what I could never have reasoned, a scandal of some physical imagination that knows the ignorant rain & the notorious errors that matter. The "gravity" of error that creatures our flux, creatured by a kind of ignorance God is ignorant of.

Plebejus acmon

Fruit Falls & Ruin Is Appetite

What is the ground made of? The dispensation of life & its ambitious collaboration with a ceaselessly eroding planet. Beside that, mostly death. Beside death? mostly emptiness---but of a prosperous kind that offers up an unlit accretion to swallow us. A kind that is a coming apart gathered about the dying-out as it frees each privileged end---ending most often where a pore begins. The vital naught only an egg can penetrate & only the dead make numerous. A fetal vanishment. A swollen decay turning into holes so there may be breath. A trembling hollow where the potent springs & withers more than it is perpetuated. It is absence creatured; the absence decay increases; to leave behind the beyond that is the dark that surrounds a hole one day we’ll rest in. The promised dark the ground is preoccupied with.

We as creatures of the short-lived, porous assemblies that exploit the interventions of emptiness, cannot fly free of the sunny preponderance, or stand against the excess of respiration unburden of soil, thoughtful & deathless. The hollow surrounds us. We do not disclose souls that may abandon the well-lit regard, the good corruption, the rot that initiates. Rather we are obliged to elaborate the determined contamination, this appetite of a planet; its solum of emptiness; this wasting without transcendence; this persistent, pregnant mortality.

Leave for it, what you live upon. 
Corvus corax

Death's Tissue

Plant what you bury & let those who you abandon become what you cherish: life of death, love & issue.

Of soil etc.: fertile; prolific; teeming with

Sex makes death an issue of great import because Death is pregnant with sex which is how we remember the dead.

Matters

In the absence of emptiness there are aggregates, and where emptiness is present, there are pores, and the “necks” of pores that connect to other matters, the absence of which is the matter we know. The matter we know is consumed & reduced to excrement, to the voids of death where it is ravished by the mysterious extravagance of this emptiness.

But the matter we know gathers & penetrates: humic clay, bacterial ooze, root exudate, mucus of hypha, waste of fauna; dispersion forces, filamentous actinomycetes, sloughing of root caps, genesis of meristems, adventuring mycelia, "hands" of the fingering protozoa, biofilms of considered agglomeration, & by virtue of those who open & skin the emptiness, biopores that feel their way through soil—all these "things" that touch us when we die & spire us with such as we grow.
But what is touched is mostly untenanted—these “holes” & those held in place by aggregates, in great excess, grow together as the "matter of space". Captured by the dark of our universe, light is neither the matter of emptiness nor the matter that makes us. It's sorta like encouragement.

The Power We Live By

What passes, either as the thought of a thing perpetuated or the thing itself, serves to elect us though we forget the critical allegiance, remember at best, only its enduring solidarity. Death is the performance of great citizenship even as life affords us its only office.

I Kings 2

To Solomon, King David spoke: “I am going the way of all earth.” So it be the perpetuated solum to sink us into immortality. But who among flesh, that sleep with decay & dream the sleep of the dead, will not wake from this unsettled beyond in a stench of lion by the old bone fence & a heart stamping the dark till a sun decide?

To coil & flop like a snake pinned by its snout---raptor of our wasting, of our worries to squeeze breath out of thought? What king-to-be not fear the ease of ruin, the grazing fauna hidden in spoil---the void of soil & its perishing film, water of last-flora to take us out of life? Digest & excrete each david, solomon & rehoboam (thus this very loam) because nothing is left that is not everlasting?
The horror of putrescence it seems is the the shame of a naked singularity?

Inside Novelty

The thought of a thing precedes the thing itself, but not its potentiality. The unthought thing, never certain of its potent "to be" (to be decay’s necessity & increase’s sufficient determination) cannot conceive till thought itself & of things passing, be perpetuated. This means Memory is a power we live by; learn of by the likes of the dead & of sex----our more celebrated among  "recent", thoughtful perpetuations (lest we forget gravity, time & emptiness).      

Appetite

As the perpetuation of the thought of things, memory is the errant power that figures in all the genesis, pollution, compenetration, association, dying, decay & preponderance of ancestral stuff that spires us, be it the light that quickens the thinking tree, water that flees the fingering root, or the beast’s great annuli & its years that flee; figures in its rings of lignin & that lignin's rings of phytonutrients, companion energies of bond as those of division, each sink & fountaining, every ascent out of the emptiness, every ascent of remembrance touching the ineffable newness of what is not yet a thought of a thing, but will be.

To learn is not unique—we’re certain that knowing is as abundant as all the time & emptiness that floats & currents the variety that makes for ruined pines & whispering snow, or the oil of worms & their heated, unguent holes; that quickens mycelium threading its chalk-white hyphae through naked waste, or makes its way among the excesses that commune as humus; as common as the breathing fundament that exhausts & issues—learning is the effort of the ignorant: of silt loam, of root, of nematode, of protozoan & dying bacterium, of the discarded feathers, the ravished carcass, the corrupt bark & tree-throw, the gravel bar & braided river, the foot-hill of breccia & lava flow, the abyssal plate & whet sierra, the fire of viscous plumes engorged & frenzied for these heaving seas, fossil light, not even plenished, penetrating vast distances, laboring thought through all this dark & all this emptiness.