Primary Sources
The river of life flows toward the mouth of God
1.
In high school
I first read
e.e. cummings,
his single leaf swooning
before my eyes
in its parenthetical cage,
and I knew that the loneliness,
I was feeling then,
would never really go away,
and it made me all the hungrier to stay
at the feast of words
to which cummings himself
had come far and wee:
goat-footed and carrying balloons.
2.
As we're born doesn't the soul fall like a leaf
into the body, each birth then,
like turning over a new one?
But because I was sitting up,
my mother said it felt like she was losing
her bones to a pair of giant pliers.
She grunted like an animal and bit her lip.
When they call you a frank breach,
you are a pretty big tear, a fissure, a loose brick
in the wall they've built around chaos.
It's a terrible way to give birth,
but the doctors let her try to push me out
even though I was over nine pounds.
Finally one of them had mercy
and reached inside her to turn me
the way you sometimes have to do
with a cow in calf, or a couch
on a narrow staircase.
She said I was blue
when I finally came out
and had tremors
so they put me into an isolette
and called for emergency Baptism.
She didn't get to hold me for several days
which made her think they were lying to her
when they said I was beautiful.
She was sure I was dead.
Stanislav Graf says we never forget
the amniotic universe we lived in
or the onset of delivery with its terror
and its mystery. It shapes us sure as pruning
shapes a tree for the rest of its life.
This means I never know what I'm getting into
and so am often startled
by what others can see coming clear as day.
But it also gives me hope that my leaf
will crouch in the crook of its branch
so it has to be wrenched out of hiding,
by the hands of the wind
after all the others have gone.
3.
Before it rains they go belly up,
fish belly leaves, swimming in schools
making the world tilt
as air readies to turn to water
and trees to tentacles of drift kelp.
Trees like the arteries inside us
branching out finer and finer,
feeding the earth,
mapping what we can't see,
and giving us the story in shades of green.
I want to crack the code of tree intelligence.
I pick up an oak leaf
so like my father,
his hands long and brown
from working in the elements.
Dark he was, dark and still as silence.
I pick up a yellow maple leaf
read it round and bright as my mother
who could be like the sun when she wanted to,
but retreated behind a cloud
whenever things got dangerous.
Both of them fallen so long ago
and yet I try to bring back what I can.
4.
One time I walked through one of Whitman's poems
and a Louisiana live oak spoke to us both.
Well actually it uttered joyous leaves as it stood all by itself,
which led him to understand how much his happiness
depended on love, on having the murmur of others near,
which led me to understand that I am probably, at this point,
more like the tree than like Walt.
Each leaf a hand reaching out.
Hands dancing a choreography,
now syncopated, now waving all at once,
this chorus trembling just out of reach,
in body language of rhythm and light.
We watchers turn and read and dream
those green hands moving under the skin,
and in our isolation
we are cradled across the breach.
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