Arroyo

Richard Greenfield

SEQUENCE

They sit in the soap tree in the canyon

ANHINGA

Waking to this hybridity      snake-bird

the high elongated rasp
shallowing out and weighing down

the despair in our own unrealized betweenness—

how to speak through the divide we’ve made?

“On first seeing them”

an origin story

the god-hand

dropped a snake’s skin to the earth—
a gift for the orders of the kingdom?

to give to steal—

so they should thrive in elongated occupation
of the mangroves—

and submerge—

and fly.

:

See the axe man among dream birds—

released into a tiny beginning as an expelled seed

—in the pure middle without margins—

in a gap—
where the salt-light planed into an x on their necks.

He was chopping.

This dull hacking

of necks from bodies
became heads and necks
that are total spectral bodies—

and was a crying revenant washed out into our
human overwhelm and mire

and was augmented through old exits

from this world—

Coda:
arroyo narrowed with talus
Braided arroyo
arroyo
 
the idea of ‘freedom’:

imagining a thing (a being) as free can be nothing but simply

imagining it while we are ignorant of the causes

by which it has been determined to act

a corporation is an individual

there are bacteria with hairlike structures, pilli, that extend
from the cell surface to scavenge the broken genomes cast
loose by the death or breakdown of other microbes

collecting this gene stuff
onto their own surfaces    to hide behind the remains
of citizen bacteria    safe from the host’s defenses

as we step into the protest
to kluge?

changing less standing into less standing around

to still feel the same as before:     singular
but to feel newly, self-consciously:
many

somewhere                        is                    difference
contact

here                        the
between                                  and

exchange                      there            also
astonishing                                  of

and                                 is
the                                          chance

community                              of                          all
different                                                 we

out                                    intersection
the                                                            ways

speak

yet middle ground

may be encounter and
not exchange

or
looking only to speak
to those who speak
the same
language