I want not to catalogue the doings of famous people much like how journalism wants not to provide the emotional history of a drop of water that drips from a coat cuff to a face. It wanted to be a river, move small things to the ocean. Buoy a maudlin jellyfish. Now the drip drags itself apart. It rapidly becomes air. Vapor soars in from atop the lake, hands clasp but not forever. I’d like to catch the feather as it tornadoes off the wing, encourage its whirligig seesaw descent, pull lips atop bamboo flutes and excite those silent marrow chambers. It’s drag that lifts the rook and steers the 747, drag that lofts the dolphin’s frolic, necessary, desperate. Cataphraxys, sounds nice, so does mulberry bush and engorged robin belly. Hollow allows for an echo. I want to be shmammered from the first gulp, have the clasp rattled off my jacket. Lumens dislodge molecular bonds and the air pressure fails to keep things down, grounded. Rooting. Enamored with kept secrets. There are trees whose root systems are so intertwined it’s crazy to call them separate trees. The real tree is the root, and it’s slowly the tongue, slowly the world, slowly tonguing the world alive. Aspen stand, neural network, nightlit highway, delta. Great Barrier Reef, the calcified skeletons bleached and suspended in what must seem like air, pockmarked with wabi. O broken tractor previously sexy that rusts in the Iowa sun, I can’t imagine you without rain, pounding a windshield, each droplet bashing itself to droplets bashing themselves to endless spatter til finally, okay, sure, maybe there is a god, but more importantly there is a hand, there is a flipper, there is a wing, there is an ocean full of bones.
Vapor
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