The Hunter, the dark woods, & the dénouement

Ela Zubrowska : color is on flowers

And so your enemy 
stalks you. 

You thirst, you 
stumble; wonder if this heavy 
quilt of night will suffocate or free;

if wilderness conspires 
to make you know how small 
you truly are. Or how infinite. How 
frail. How alive. 

Ancient as this deer run.
      

                                         the drum, the heartbeat, the breath, the warcry
                        the breath, 
          the drum, 
                      the heartbeat, 
                                  the warcry


So now become the seeker.

Turn into the hunter.

Turn around and charge after

what's chasing you down, run with

dark blades emerging from your fear

to stop in the air and turn the other way,

poised to strike as your strange new weapon.


                      the drum, the heartbeat, the breath, the warcry
                                                       the breath, 
                                           the drum, 
                           the heartbeat, 
                the warcry

And then 
when you decide 
you're ready to die,

you'll see the bullet 
as it stops,

blooms, and pulses light, quiet

battle song pouring out of this nexus 

of unseen power encircling you—

                                  the breath
                                   the drum 
                                the heartbeat 
                                  the warcry
The drum, the heartbeat, the breath, the warcry

and here, in your 
near-death, your rebirth by
blood and dirt and hunger and butchered fear

you'll find out who you really 
are. It can't be done

any other way.

Air

NASA : Yukon Territory

I. visibility

I still see you in the shape of

your clarity, moving with such 

strange speed, almost like light

yet slow as our hearts 

beating underwater

Running in a layer beyond 

this fake backdrop painting

where you can't be seen but 

where your true body emerges,

your skin, your hair, your breath

somehow more real, more 

whole, more urgent and alive

Yet it's all unsayable—

—you said you speak my language

but I don't even have the words to bridge

this chasm you know nothing of 

crossing or even falling into

Do you know it's all there, all 
free for the taking, your riches, 
your weapons of song, of story—

this great divide that waits for you to

see its vast space that invites us to play

and revel in its air, compels our very

movement, that is even joy—

Joy that is the unspoken word

that is the forbidden saying

that is the code to the passage

where the scrolls enfold secrets

that lead to the caves no one's

yet discovered—

II. invisibility

There's a holiness that descends

when you step into a dark place

untouched since creation. Its quiet

ambushes your being and you know

the ground is a threshold you

can't escape unchanged—

—and the voice you longed to hear

all your life doesn't come from behind,

yet suddenly you know this language

and it knows you. All your words

annihilated and remade.

This is why we understand nothing

now. Why you look at me and feel

the ache of waste, why what I see I 

can't say or pull out of the soil of this

field I bought with everything  I owned. 
We can't bring ourselves to name it

for fear of looking down and finding we've 

been walking blind through air all along.

If this is all there is, then why do I

see how all of what you show the world

is just crackling bark, and the loss of it

doesn't mean death as you think?

Why do I see the true skin of what

could grow around the mass of you,

smooth and firm and fitting the whole of

your layered years, you instead like an aspen

with someone sitting in your shade, writing

letters on the substance of what you shed? 

And yes, why do I still believe

that faithful sun will rise tomorrow

when this cave I've slept in my

whole life has told me it's all a lie?

As a child, I saw it: 
why do they say 
that we can't see air
when air is what 
makes us seen?

You tell me.
I know you
still are there.

The Last of the Basketweavers in the Last of the Wetlands

When you go to gather the grasses,

you better listen to what they’re saying.

To you.

It could be: wait, wait, wait, wait.

Better to burn us. Harvest the new shoots.

Watch for a brushfire.

Or: You are the keeper of worlds.

You are the creator of thresholds.

You are to weave us into intricate keyholes

no one but the wily will see.

Even: We wish we could use your strange heart 
as a form to wend around instead of the whiskey 
bottle your grandfather left. We wish your fingers felt

more in their nerve endings. We wish you

felt less before splitting us in threes.

We wish you sang like you once did.

And yes, then you can sing your low register

track over the bridge that holds all the sweetness,

all the power of a moment of water beneath it.

Not everything you look for will hear you.
But the one that recognizes the unrepeatable timbre,

the fingerprint in the air, the underbelly of

a molecule’s frame—this is how you will be drawn.

Not to the strands, but to the final shape, the

lovely curve you will be the first to discover

in this medium; 

the interlock of age and use

and color that never touched 
before you thought

them into movement.

Orenda

Great Tree of Peace, Adirondacks

Beauty, these days,

has become elusive.

You look at the picture of

aspens printing yellow hands

on dark snow-capped pines

and think nothing but the headlines—

the thoughts, the thoughts,

the thoughts without power.

The shapes no longer move you;

the stories are leverage

to define your image to the crowd.

No wonder your dreaming is 
as distant, as erratic as your pulse.

What would your ancestors say?

They were tired, too, back when

they had but one choice at a time

hanging there smooth before them.

Perhaps their lives depended on

seeing every shift of the wind,

but even so, only some
sat at the foot of ancient council trees

and saw

the other world.

So it's likely that they,

even now, 
are carrying you with compassion

to that hidden spring between the cliffs

they too got lost on,

letting down your broken body

into the healing water 
that moves like a song.

You must let beauty come back to you.

Seep into your wounds and

into your marrow again;

be the word that makes you clean,

that lifts you into its current

so that you're always traveling together,

keeping watch while the other sleeps.

Oh how it still loves you,

even as you lay there half-dead,

undreaming,

having gorged yourself on all

that promises and numbs.

It never stops its search party,

never hesitates to scale the walls of the fort,

break down the great dark door

and spirit you out of your opulent dungeon.

It lives for the moment

you feel its love again,

when you open the gifts

it's saved up for you

all these wandering years.

Luring song

This, this is the thing

the heart of the universe

the nucleus of the acorn

the one sound beneath all sounds

the direction all directions 
eventually run.

This is why you are hungry.

Why you go searching

even when you don’t know you are.

Why grace alights

as a fragile winged creature

on the stone in your belly

and brings it back to life

calling it through the million years

of stony hibernation,

the slow sleep 
of the uncalled.

And so I am calling you.

And so you are called.

And so the universe

the acorn

the one sound

the directions

they hear me.

And so the call

it travels through the heartline into the being

into secret cathedrals and crevices

beneath the skin 
of earth.

And so we are drawn.

The movement of God beneath atoms of light,

of darkness, unthinkable particles

goes finally unhindered.

It is

the simplest ceremony.

I see you coming from
the edge of the desert

over the curve of the foothill

up from the other side of the solar system.

I see the water and the wind

rejoice.

Prophecies of the 5th Dimension

Eric Haggart : Angel Oak

0.

Once I was praying and saw that the longing of the whole world fit

into the smallest acorn. Later I heard that a saint named Julian had

seen the same thing in darkest of ages across time and water.

So I wonder what visions bloom in your

still hour when the earth stops around your breath

and all you know is that your heart’s on fire.

I.

There was an orchestra on a star, and you

were in the orchestra playing kettle drums.

And the drums were the center of the concerto

hurling it away from a dozen black holes, and the

music swirled around your every gleaming struck beat.

And a violin humbly snuck into the finale, making your

finish the power you always knew it must be.

II.

You found the house in the middle of a forest you’d come

through many routes as a child but never seen a built thing in.

And the moment you saw it you knew it made itself a hidden thing

to the eyes of everyone else, even insects. Only you could ascend

the tree to the seamless door, only you saw the wonder of every

emerging room. And only you felt the velvet of air as the walls

disappeared, showing you how to be held.

III.

The sound that shook you was your heart

thundering your ribcage to vapor, turning you to spirit.

The fear is power once you’re falling through the zeroes

of altitude, a droplet driving downward, in gravitational

surrender. There is no loss in the jump, in the slight lean

into nothing that is all that’s needed for magnificence.

IV.

Understand this dark river you’ve come down, no stops

between continental shores. Consider the nights with

drenched paddle in hand, muscle burning away thought.

There was that one patch in the starless black quilt of night stitched

into next night in which the sky turned luminous around a comet so

unearthly, you struggled later to believe it. That hour or minute, you

saw the shapes of trees protecting you, the slap of broad tail coming

down in the water and on the other bank.

The beavers came up from their maze below to watch you drift by,

their eyes solemn, acknowledging the long waters you traveled

to be the first to discover that they, in fact, were the secret architects

of Macchu Picchu, Stonehenge, the hanging gardens of Babylon.

As you turned the bend into the rapids again, you heard them sing

a hymn of wonder.

V.

And then the one tree spoke as it grew around you, reciting back-to-back

histories of every living thing it had seen or heard of. Since before the time

men began burning down everything they couldn’t take.

Except for it. It told you it saw you coming, five hundred ringed

years after air turned into war. Not because you are a prophet,

or even an exceptional warrior, but because it saw you see it

the first time you crept around its circumference with a burning

heart, quiet as moss.

Hózhó náhásdlíí

 A Christmas Eve poem for all who walk in darkness.

John Hwang : Skid Row

Beauty before you, in darkness;

In darkness, beauty behind you.

Beauty above you, in darkness;

In darkness, beauty around you.

In the back of your mind

you know it

and yet as you run against this dark current

you can’t even breathe.

In the back of your mind

there is a way that winds forward,

toward open road, still waters, nights of kind rest—

the kind others speak of as a common starling on a wire,

little knowing a rare bird has come to bless them again with presence.

You could go crazy

imagining the darkness embrace you 
with such love instead of betrayal, 
because now it slices you open,

stabs you again and again,

rejects you for the millionth time.

You could go crazy

remembering light, remembering a time

when light on the water touched you,

made you feel something;

when light in the valley

broke open your heart and nourished it.

Instead the cruel yoke 
bends you toward asphalt,

down to kiss the dirt and pay it homage.

Instead the iron rod

beats you into a cell half the size of your

burst hopes shriveled dreams

so that you long to evaporate.

Instead your shoulders

fold inward as you carry endless piles of coal

that fuel nothing that feeds you.

Instead your luminous face—

if only you still could see it—

is cloaked by an executioner

who kills without giving its name.

This is why I send the light toward you

to meet you in the valley at the center of the ocean floor.

It rushes like a fury of lava even now,

though you don’t see it,

though your senses are shrouded in exacting poison.

Fur-tongued, muscles seized, plugged, cloud-blinded—

even in paralysis you reach,

second by millimeter by aeon by mile.

This is why I send the light toward you

as you reach, whether you know it or not. 

It climbs the winter cliffs as the city sleeps in misery,

its gentle hands moving over each frozen cell

and calling them back to life.

It weaves this way around

every battered reed, every shivering seed

saying 
all is not lost;

everything is never lost;

anything that is lost can be made whole,

can be called into being out of what was not.

And so this is how I come for you.

This is how you walk in beauty.

In darkness beauty walks;

Beauty walks in darkness.

It has become beauty again.
It has become beauty again.