From “Love Letter to the Future: A Book of the Land in Eight Acts”

act 1 , scene 1 : do you know what it means for our survival? Fog spun into silk on the knee of the comptroller, propelled toward the crest of Ontario, the old, faded star, steambreath onto the windshield. To orient in the finest sense of cackles, mute chrysanthemums, funneling inordinate nakedness, absorbed, absorbed, immediately absorbed. Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, we stay limber, each line choreographed from a tremendous mouthful of swamp, skunk cabbage brining at the jowls, acquiesced to pestilence, and exaggerated diffidence. Do you know what it is to clamp your shell an extra foot into the silt riverbank, kissing the soles of passersby, silky grains churning the earth over? Makeshift ceremonial dances, fine textiles culled from thrift store bins display brightly-colored throats who feed stacks of cash killed on recycled names. There is a golden tapestry on the berry-stained bottom of Wealth Woman’s basket of abalone. Beneath it are the exhausted faces of her babies grown old in the length of the inhale, and a facsimile remains from all the cycles spilled over, since nature cannot acid wash, since frizz canvassing the ozone always carries over. Geometry for days, countless days, spin-cycled through a craftsman’s circumpolar hands. There’s always another grotto or chamber where things dwell, they say. Wandering skitterers we are, the Northern Lights vacuum pried-open skulls. We cover ourselves with hides and entrails, overripe elderberries, looking to steal a moment of letup from the glare. The limbs of the Old Ones shunt aside bare toes, stripped solid and indifferent as a bear’s den or an ant’s apartment. Don’t be so much in charge, the frogs say, of coalescing wolverine trails huddled in 60-million-year pellet tracks when the wetlands dried out. The way soaked, green corpuscles rasp each other’s mouths and hands braiding the woof of God’s mind, that’s how it is, says the giant rat’s captive wife. Even if you can only faintly hear the eighth narrative told in the corner of the babbling wooden-slat house, that is enough leftover hooligan grease for the gods with killer whale ganglia. Knuckles rasp proscenium floorboards, splattering herring peck at scops owl’s waist, spruce branch lowered, scrapes conglomerate bedrock. Mother-in-law’s atonic hands lunge for stewed milt. One can conclude it’s a virus to plant burdensome layers of topographic crust on self-renewing limbs, like there was more to it than rustling fingers at the end of the line. All components must be in order, or it’s an ulcer here, a bladder infection there, a baked-out parking lot, fizzing in trampled-over, chastened hairlines. Hold, hold, hold, hold in your palms the Steller’s jay that beats its wings on glaciers lying high and straight over rivers slicing into cool nettles. Sea lions suck up a quick breath, dive and waft on the outskirts of ballerinas who gyrate in like-mind to classics bubbling up from Sedna’s citadels. I’m here to show you what you can do with this sandbar dialect, says the humpback whale and the goatsbeard moss, and the ore of iron oxide in the shoreline cliff. You must trust, she says, your swimming blood, joints lumbering in shadows, the dolphin clicking out to you, far above ground. And we should feed just as much as eat, says the heart your body formed around.