Extra Hidden Life, among the Days - Brenda Hillman Wesleyan Poetry Series

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it that is not the same as bearing it?

      Judith Butler, “On Grief and Rage”

      This mycorrhizal network architecture suggests an efficient and robust network, where large trees play a foundational role in facilitating conspecific regeneration and stabilizing the ecosystem.

      “Architecture of the wood-wide web: Rhizopogon spp. genets link multiple Douglas-fir cohorts” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2009.03069.x/full

      … I will open my dark saying upon the harp.

       Psalm 49

      We had a grief

      we didn’t understand while

      standing at the edge of

      some low scrub hills as if

      humans were extra

      or already gone;—

      what had been in us before?

      a life that asks for mostly

      wanting freedom to get things done

      in order to feel less

      helpless about the end

      of things alone—;

      when i think of time on earth,

      i feel the angle of gray minutes

      entering the medium days

      yet not “built-up”:: our

      work together: groups, the willing

      burden of an old belief,

      & beyond them love, as of

      a great life going like fast

      creatures peeling back marked

      seeds, gold-brown integuments

      the color time

      will be when we are gone—

       (ekphrastic haibun)

      When they ask “What are you working on now that the elements are finished” i say the elements are never finished; in China they have metal, in India they have ether, in the West we are short on time. Wood has also been named as an element. In white Euro fairy tales, children are sent into the woods, probably the Black Forest, carrying baskets covered with cloth made by child laborers just as factories are beginning. When i first read the Frost snowy woods piece as a desert child in the 60s, i experienced a calm as he enters the whose woods these are he thinks he knows, though i didn’t know that many woods in Tucson or a little horse thinking it queer or a village. What would it have been like to be sent out with a small covered basket if you were a peasant child into what we now call the ecotone, the region between two environments—a marsh with striped frogs for example—then on into the woods where a peasant uprising is being planned.

      We have sent them all into the woods

      We have sent them all into the woods

      We have sent them all into the woods

      & we know exactly whose thin logged-out woods these are. What do people need from poetry during the changes? The changes are immeasurable. Perception, form, & material locked into the invisible. Many need calm poetry, especially at weddings where they feel uneasy, & i would certainly write that way if i believed calm were key to any of it, but if what woods are left are lovely, dark, deep, they are also oblique, obscure, magical, owned for profit, full of fragile unnamed species, scarce on time, time that barely exists though people base their lives on imagining it does. i hoped to find some wisdom to send back to you & that is what i am working on now, my present hopeful wild & unknown friends …

      Scraping, on the horizon— & the disk

      rose, throbbing, to the triple cloud—

      the enigma responded: in the forest,

      a wood mind swayed on the crest

      while the angle brought ground water,

      always a thin other, down

      to the river … Through lace life, late life

      light rises bent /// — you stand a while;

      & if, at midnight, that raw moon

      slashes your bed

      through the cage of the blinds,

      oh now the sweet owl

      calls to its cripple

      & hurries across the meadow

      where t i m e is carried, tranquil & stretched

      —— how can knowledge spread itself thus,

      unable to sort itself out? & you might weather this:

       you feared no one would love you

      & when they did, you feared

      you would not be forgiven

      such a small word, time

      yet it is friends

      with both nothings—

      The bride tree puts down its roots

      below the phyla. It is there

      when we die & when we are born,

      middle & upper branches reaching

      the planet heart by the billions

      during a revolution we don’t see.

      Quarks & leptons are cooling

      on their infant stems, spinning the spinning

      brain of matter, fled to electrical dark

      water, species with names the tree

      can hold in the shale shade brought

      by the ambulance of art;

      no one but you knows what occurred

      in the dress you wore in the dream

      of atonement, the displaced tree in

      the dream you wore, a suffering endurable

      only once, edges that sought release

      from envy to a more endurable loss,

      a form to be walked past, that has

      outworn the shame of time,

      its colors sprung through description

      above a blaze of rhizomes spreading

      in an arable mat that mostly

      isn’t simple but is calm & free—

      —seal pups ar-ar-ar- —

      & the skin of the soul felt a chill,

      especially the left side of the

      S, facing the Pacific (specific Pacific

      specific Pacific ar ar ar);

      sandstock burdock human s pines

      (does the s move toward pines or spines?)

      — buckwheat hardpan up a hill

      finding

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