Page 47 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

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Water. Mint. Water-mint. The braided currents at the bend of the nearby

stream. Their fluid consonance. A granite boulder, like a sibyl behind summer

leaf, shade-spattered with lichen and moss. Bachelard writes that, in human

reverie, the rock imagines. Not we that imagine the rock. Because how could we

have come here, have accepted so much, without having had a foundation to

build on? You, then, as luggage, our library, perhaps our DNA? Entrance as

noun: what we step through. Entrance as verb: how we are changed. What

could we see if not movement? The sibyl measures each fish's weight against

the blue root of her own. The leafage separates in autumn into its individual

tones. We say autumn moves us. That it is moving. Given the forecast. Given

how easily the subject can be erased.

Notes:

This prose poem is from a new manuscript I am working on, provisionally titled Where

Outside the Body is the Soul Today. When I began the poems, it was to challenge the

prevailing assumption that words like “soul” and “spirit” don’t belong in our highly

technological, secular world, and that, as well, they are not a fit subject for

contemporary poetry. Contrary to my understanding that soul was something found

deep inside us, as I wrote these poems, I began to discover that I can sense soul most

clearly in others, especially the animal, plants, rocks, waters, and winds that people our

world. Anima /animal: our intuition, even expressed in our language, that the soul is

embedded in the animal body.

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