Anasazi, Ancient Enemies

I rubbed wax crayon against blowing paper. From the rock face footed a dancer white through red. My family gave me over to it, gone for the river. Were I a peasant harvesting grapes near Beaune in the last century, even, I might have dreamed a saint lifting off for Arles, Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, and knowing about cannon in that long peace, might have been troubled therefore that my flier hauled a magnum of the best and bloodied the west sky with it and vanished. My fisting that loose sheet in place was secretarial, not visionary! Already in that decade small tribes entered the void like windows on a skyscraper when the bent janitor makes his way. But those flick back on each night, costly difference. It is not only portents in dream or flapping images of the gone or the soon-to-be-going or the tremblingly poised that catch like undertow the foot in tide-rip toeing down the singing or remembered beach. We study populations in the forests, we hold the paper flat, mark, note, warn—the dictated prophecies do their work, we do some work— cut horn from rhinos so they won’t be poached. But, to go on from there, one needs to stand in the doorway some evening and feel the air as if it were fire pulling illusionlessly, letting the draw of one fact heat its chain of links, such as, Japan clear-cutting forests in Siberia where tigers not already harvested lope their dwindling range, two hundred as the hinge for their growled arc of existence, bones of the others ground to powders for old men’s potencies. One needs to feel the tug of the draft on skin, the drag of process utterly anciently itself. Faster, now, the pull is from birth through dwelling through dissolution, along lines streaming through us, ageless winds.