Gondwana Read online

  Alaskan thrust into the cross-to-Asia scene. Vast multitudes

  of birds, innumerable birds, congregate here, Springing and

  Falling, for the refueling will take them countless thousand

  miles to their life destinations. The place a Park, inviolate in

  theory. Now minute population on the Refuge edge calls for

  a road right through the Izembek to reach a border town for

  groceries and such. The population problem. End of the You-

  S-A? The politics is shit. The economics shit. And the reli-

  gion shit. Bright dreams once dreamed in that small hut on

  Eastern shores one July Fourth now Mickey Mouse. But why

  not cut the nation into seven parts: all such environs sound?

  Persistence must persist undoubtedly. I’m of this nation for

  good or worse, I’ll live the rest of it. To die here is my hope.

  iii)

  In silent tropic forests the Rats have crept and get to work. A tree

  comes down. Bribes to the ranger to desert his charge and take

  substantial naps in hut. Bribes to the men who drag the logs down

  to the river. Bribes to the watchers at river’s edge hailing the rafts.

  Bribes to the raft racers braving the rapids down to a silent pool.

  Bribes to the canoe coxswains take logs from pool to roadside.

  Bribes to the middlemen move logs from rafts to trucks. More

  bribes at police check points on road to logger mogul’s station.

  Bribes from the logger mogul to the government. Bribes once

  again to the export guys. Who bribe the buyers in distant lands.

  Who bribe our buyers to source illegal lumber. In the vacant

  forest, the land sports oil palm in its ugliness, its dust-dry mi-

  litary ranks, its killing fields for infant animals lost there and

  starving. Meanwhile the Rats eat monkey meat, bush soup with

  menaced species drowned in it. Cash waltzes round the universe

  filling our time, our jobs, our confidence. Whether the planet goes

  to waste or not, what matters is our jobs. “Better to die tomorrow

  than today” the proverb goes: these children who need feeding

  must be fed, no matter they will go to war a little later for their

  fathers’ sins. The water wars. Crop wars. The population wars

  & “more”! We have forgotten dearest goddess, we have forgotten!

  Whatever our persuasion, we now take. Land and, sky and. Grab

  air, water, forest, oil, our wholesome diamonds, rubies, emeralds,

  and—leaving the first born natives of the earth homeless, dead.

  Our forest fathers at their work dream their opium dream. Our

  mother faints, losing her arms dropped one by one into the forest

  rivers and floated down for sale. World sold to whoredom now!

  Just never said enough. But word unheard, warnings silenced.

  8. cold unmistakable

  i)

  Raising the images of birds up out of books

  since they no longer fly the fields and forests,

  no longer darken skies in their migrations, or

  sing dawn out on greening boughs. Remembering

  dawn walks, a land deserted—no other humans—

  thinking the love borne for one bird atop her tree

  outweighed the love for one last human race. Ice,

  Ice. Ice now turns again. Not some sheets moving

  down to cover some cold parts, but a totality of

  ice, the world made ice down to its bones, and,

  Look! there’ll never be another broiling summer

  to melt this ice away! Seasons disappeared. A

  flatness about earth and sky; all lines run parallel,

  not up and sideways, old authenticity. Change,

  most “eternal” of our principles, motionless. Such

  distant memories of deal termed “Climate change”!

  Is it because, before the ice, a fire had blazed, razed

  every landscape (nature or culture) down, propelled

  to final, wandering loss the earth’s last populations?

  Today, far off beyond the nearest ridges, the sound

  of one sea howling, one sea barking: all prey has

  faded from the land; there is no food; even the taste

  of food has been forgotten. The rabbit you remem-

  ber suffers a new leukemia: loses its use of limbs,

  spring of the muscle, fire of the blood, falls now

  from left to right, from right to left, trying to eat

  the bird seed scattered here. And is no food for us

  who lie at home on beds of nettles, waiting for

  the old lady in her wagon—she never seems now

  to remember us. Her priests emasculated catamounts

  wanting from us only a sandwich where there is no

  sandwich: interminable begging. Ice given in return.

  ii)

  In the selfsameness of the latitude, it’s all one taste

  we fill the mouth with—whatever we may swallow,

  stiff with brine, reaches no novel flavor in our throats

  whose backs all parched, all burning, will fail to

  recognize that joy once married in our hearts to each

  beloved mouthful of a life. So that the lastness when

  it comes one day out of earth’s loss, the lady in her

  wagon reaching out a pinkie—why merely backs us

  where she’d engineered us: each single his, or hers,

  into an origin no longer loved—and so much less

  worth waiting for through our unending holocausts.

  9. laughing, singing, praying trees

  i)

  With intent. Never explaining, never justifying,

  never requesting anything for self (its vulpine

  face, ferocious eyes), determined on a task no

  one had trained her for, no one ever suggested

  the task was feasible for one of such low caste.

  Year upon year, into insanity, the move enacted

  to breaking-point. Had not enrolled for such. Not

  drafted. Trees laugh, sing, pray for this one while

  this one prays for them. Sits among waves waiting

  for the next mission. No one is ever at this concert,

  no one ever configures music will continue. There

  is no possibility that solitude resolves itself, that

  conversation can turn thinkable, that there might

  be some contact between the proposition and the

  solution. Who can imagine a solitude so massive

  the consciousness of other cannot be formulated,

  spoken? But can be shown? A fright to neighbors

  who may ignore her, but hear her sometimes being

  her being. How beautiful the scene that this takes

  place on, how lovely forth to tears the landscape

  plays: green alleys lined with flowers lead to vast

  meadows; these to green seas beyond the visibility

  today when flight is limited. This girl has never seen

  a sea. “Not to be purchased I” says girl. “Succored

  & helped, yes, but never, never bought” she swears,

  refusing every shadow of any hard salvation. As if

  there could be some salvation—in any different life!

  ii)

  Voice of a mouse, a timid mouse—unfitted to the

  vulpine mouth which would devour this voice if the<
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  scenario allowed it. O sweet beloved of ancient days

  (beyond a thousand wars, always the same, always

  from one disaster to the next—the characters pay no

  attention), lover resolved, but grown inoperative

  beyond the confines of the body, that body grown

  immense as terra mater. And had not single son, nor

  single daughter to populate the nation. On knees, mixed

  herbs, mixed drugs, balms, elixirs, mixed all the cures

  would lubricate the eyes—as if her sockets illuminated

  heaven. The stars! I now remember: she never did see

  stars. She was so much the day’s light was this maternal

  Earth, no night could drown a Sun she would forgive

  if only love could manifest at last and enter solitude, in

  such a way that solitude perdured. But now forgiven

  and annealed. At last a pregnancy self-generated by this

  love. O Child of light come down to visit us! Child of a

  captured fire silver & gold! Child, driven, innervated light!

  exitus generis humani, ii

  a. as if philosophy

  An awakening. But that nothing can leave its boundary,

  to stray outside of it. Unmake the new. Return to zero.

  Do not pass go. The sense of swimming in an undefined

  possibility’s air. The other is an I. Now you will hear

  a buzzing of the world above you—to sting you till you

  fry. Ah poet! so totally subjected to your genius theory

  or U die. Ich kan nicht wissen was in ihm vorgeht. Death

  as the wrist watch, closest to you heart. As close as heart.

  When will you wear this? When will you ever listen?

  Except, of course, under supratern discourse. Think:

  it is essential to keep in mind, always to keep in mind,

  not for a moment failing, that interruption is permitted,

  indeed will seek you homing and never fail to find you.

  As though it flew over the world, hope is committed here,

  and leaves it as it is. Observing it from far below in flight

  such divine heels waft you to disappear into oblivion.

  All heavenly activity is shut. But lack of scientific trust?

  The camera you bracket now to every creature’s back:

  you’ll witness eagle soar, a lion pounce, slither of lizzies.

  But all you’ll actually see’s a head looks sideways, back.

  Technology has failed among its great successes. Again.

  The first creations of the gods perished as sinning apes,

  unable to praise their Makers, their Lord Substantiators.

  Again, they tried to build the future for a human world;

  the gods tried to be gods, the demons demons, breaking

  over & over. Of brittle mud. Of splitting wood. To name

  the names, honor the kings. And finally of flesh they wept

  the future failure. Nothing has praised the true visage of

  Earth—nothing has risen to the godlike level. A race alas

  lacks all humanity. To be destroyed. Here come the latter

  days, O Ragnarök washed in the blood of dragons! Those

  cretinized by the religions (mostly the Abrahamics) sing

  psalms finding no one will wish to save them. The giant

  surface of a sea, seen from below by sharks, is the huge

  mouth of hell, not one bird born up onto blinding air. It’s

  claimed at last and graven down in rock: (laugh loud) that

  poetry ought to be written faintly stoned, as if philosophy.

  b. responses

  i)

  Look at parts of the wave but (even if), there is thus

  boundless movement from each part to each other,

  the ocean, still, nevertheless extinguished. Bardis-

  mally, a fearful prophet drops down into your life,

  encounters image, not in a mirror, but in manure.

  A terrifying battle for sense to make some sense.

  Never will s/he exclaim at an encounter with (wave

  follows wave) for there is no discovery, only the

  one wave simultanymous with all the other waves:

  and thus with the whole ocean. Far much too much

  of ego-satisfaction. What one illusion, referencing

  wave, wishes to offer, above all information, is an

  absence of gender difference. Wave permits many

  voicings from water textiles’ loosest to the most

  firm entanglements (sailing to far Sargassos!). Thus

  patterns reach to parallel in all their scintillations.

  Over such wholes, she who should never seem a

  visibility is seen in all magnificence. Below: scales

  on the wings of flying fish, the multituding crests

  of the one wave in its innumerable changes. Wring-

  ing the changes of the cell, the paradise, the sentence.

  Go home and rest! There is no transmigration! All

  things have to endure the sempiternity! Interminable is!

  Isness of is.

  ii)

  Text into text, thought into thought & text: exchanging

  souls. So difficult to enter and evermore to exit. Aha!

  Especially when you ignore the locus is you aim for.

  Such finding of the inner life has become desperate:

  everything sunk so deep and far there is no light, no

  tunnel. Heart, from too great frequencies of melting

  in its solitude, has turned to ocean without lands that

  can contain it: it is impossible to find a bearing there

  from which some comfort may derive. You’ve died,

  perhaps, and do not know it. Crimes you’ve committed

  without an end in sight condemn you to the gallows a

  hundred times—if justice could divine your heart and

  thus condemn you. All of us naked under our clothes

  the doctor said—but not naked enough. There would

  be murder in the streets, intense revenge, a hell of pain

  and cruelty from everyone to everyone if truth were

  told. Meanwhile, heart, liver, lungs: these three a war-

  ning. We crawl on laboring lately—as if human beings.

  c. hootless at heart & flying

  Hootless in high water. Not giving one for. The urge

  to tears rends the insides, a.k.a. guts, from pubic bone

  to throat. Birth of our inner waters mysterious as that

  of certain secret rivers in the most fragile continents.

  Now, tears suppressed throughout the conversation.

  Back then. Need to relive the past without a hooter

  contribution. Since poets’ hearts are a world’s heart,

  dixit Herr Heine, then they must surely tear to shreds

  in a terrible time. And you should curse at what the

  sandman says in his silliest, arbitrating hours? On

  back. Scents are the flowers’ feelings says the same.

  As if the ocean were the soul itself he swears again.

  And should you be depleted re belief in soul? Back

  off. The worst is entering a lion’s room and finding

  it quite empty. Yet, moments later, a lion roar rends

  the blue sky over the palace. Where is the lion now?

  Asleep on roof? Curled up among the battlements,

  and looking down at crows below? The crows, the

  ravens of our choice memories? Who walked in fie
lds

  of flowers—abundant temples by classic architects

  filling the fields while, summer-mad, the bees drove

  knives into the flowers gathering their honey and “O”

  the sun burning its way through brain and sinews, with

  maddening hopes, broke open all of memory! Out of

  it steps the girl as if she’d never left us for the darker

  side—as if her love were ours alone “forever and a day.”

  exitus generis humani, iii

  i. paris old

  Mind now roaming where body roamed ago

  thru fields, woods, forests, hills... valleys

  & caverns. Our holy planet Earth summons all

  bodies to herself—a flesh of glorious, ethernal

  summer light. Humeur / Humour / Amour—

  its incarnating process was discovered here

  in these three bodies signifying choice: in time

  beyond remembrance under these golden skies

  frequented one time by a divining prince. (I

  should remember and I don’t.) One spelled

  incarnate Love by name—the others Wisdom &

  Imperium, but all were love here indiscriminate,

  trapped in this memory. What comfort Earth has

  now all man is meltdown, the insane race dis-

  solved, while Earth alone remains inviolate in

  her fertility? How I would love to bring around

  that triad body now from memory—and live

  with them alone, roaming their fields, woods,

  forests, hills, valleys & caverns as the mind now

  roams. Hardly a day forgets to bring, crossing the

  winds below these eyes, some form the mind could

  perish for—could “die-for” as they say today—yet

  cannot. This helpless mind devoid of hands, of

  mouth to speak its love, incarcerated in a useless

  prison—that less and less is guarding anything

  beyond some photocopies of judgment long ago:

  when war roared on the Earth burning lost lovely

  flesh and terminating every chance that body ever

  held of keeping down the mind it manifested like

  a frozen flag now failing on winter’s battlefields.

  The line attempts survival, time and time too it fails.