Underland

“If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”
—Walt Whitman

Where stalactite meets bone
(in God’s childhood)
a votive syllable grows.

A compound creature’s vertebral
movement through stone,
an owl breaching the whale’s rib.

Where living rock opens
less than a foot wide,
a third soundless species,

the blue-black gleam
in a cave mouth
ghosting an eye…

hand after hand
taking the ochre’s red
on a cave wall.

In shafts and sinkholes,
the transformation of character
by organic steps—

slip-rifts (open/close)
for a breath’s scintillation
deep in the salt,

where one being ends…
nourishing a verb’s tense
below ground.

Moss Mothers

thin skins of humus
unLatinize
five standing stones
acknowledge one’s presence
intertwined threads
running over
a smallness
inhabiting the earth
a blank page
on a beetle’s back
surface textures
slowing the air
dew-fed spores
the blueprint for escape
a common language
bubbling toward the surface
algal strands
fluid and resistant
the moss mothers
something in me that’s yours
Darwin’s finches
at the eleventh hour
each parched stem
obeys in turn
hands that hold
over the tailings
eons concealed
under our feet
minute proportions
dampen the page
stilt-like shoots
bore into crevices
a puzzle piece
in the chipmunk’s footfall
microscopic rhizoids
strum from the margins
sphagnum
holding human blood
the living layer
wicks up from below
a syllable
shining ropes entangle
the protonema
ask for little enough

Cell Psalm

“The life of an organism reposes in the life of a cell.”
—Siddhartha Mukherjee

As single cells…

with a purpose (patience-winged)

only the parts
in sinusoidal stroke
searching for a name
the two-billion-year-old dawn
of one
and the many

a doorway to the outside inside

the fast and slow burn nets
imprisoned in me—
a strand uncoiled
circuiting the sun a sixtieth time

in the hidden root
an autonomous anatomy
enabling stasis
(+) silence

lessening and restoring
thread-like skeins
at a wolf’s pace
a nexus…

as a geological animal
moulds and sculpts
the ocean floor
virgin material

red cell / white cell / platelet
in nuptial number
(rubor of vital warmth)
two opposing camps
as antibodies bind
a reversed word
and two outstretched
fingers touch
the burning contours
signifying attachment
a continuum
belonging to the heart’s beat
the soma’s thousand branches
unleashing multiples
from cell to cell
clinging to life
empty spaces
whispering through a synapse
lodge in the eye
(all) (flesh) consumed and renewed
between a smile and laughter
crawling backward in time
to form new bone
the silver slither
a permutation of mutations
fooling centuries away
in a body without end.

Braid

—for Joe Porter-Bolger

the honeyed bundle
the holder and the held
the observer and observed
all that turns aside
to make a home
above and below the tip
of a stem
an equation whispered
from tree to tree
as pollen carries
on the wind
and three living syllables
emerge from the earth
in a waterdrop
algal blooms
and threadlike roots
thicken with life—
a net catching only
what can’t be held
(air-filled capillaries
where mind and water meet)
a schema for the world
in three seeds
tending the ground
yet to be loved
the vital expression
a living tree—
scented grass
arguing
an opposite point
the cattail’s touch
extending ever wider
snag’s a salmon’s
spinning
compass needle
the lichen’s alphabet
a dusting of propagules
(re)embodiment
here where the fog drips
(a mossy filament
imagining currents below)
as fir needles fall
letter by letter
the heart an eye
greening over seedbeds
an obligate symbiosis—
spilled words opening

the leaves of moss.

The Body Electric