A Selfie in the Stone Age by phcoleman

A Selfie in the Stone Age

poems PH Coleman

Start to Finish

There was a city of black pines standing on our islandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rocky spine, looking at some distance like a crowd of passers-by round a magician, or new neighbors at a block party using crowdedness as an artifice of friendship. Then, as if music were starting, the trees began swaying in the stillborn air, rooted yet dancing. A conductor moon gesticulates across the sea with her lit golden fingers rousing waves out of slumber and up, up into the loins of beaches, of bays, to the height of dreams, spilling into the lives of humans, hiding wishes in small packagesâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; family, villages, beasts stabled not broken. We are moving from the start to a finish where animals are speaking and we are those gathered in flocks. Deep in caves, we cannot hide from air, though it strips our papery skin. We measure days in heat, hours, and in the fireflies. Our ancestors watch. We step out into the tempest, joining hands, at the end, with electric trees.

Mycology

Mycelium is the fabric of the idea of surprise. A cast net, a spider web over underground, capturing the richness of the loam whence we came, to which we’ll go– that under foot. Puckerheads, ghosts, baby beef livers, upside-downs, they awake in nearly morning, covered with sleepy lawn. Circles of odd words, drawn from the wealth that’s just below us. Circles. They start and end stories, both asking and reminding us. Mushrooms in fairy rings surprising even mycelia.

Dinner Bell

This murder of crows speaks plain as ink on paper. Worms and frogs and mice– all the glorious life they use. They talk of them as friends. A rusty pickup shakes a cage of four foxes down empty city streets. The elegy they sing is drowned in asphalt rivers. That footpad Columbus came to name the Carib natives cannibals– for us. We fashion prayers for prey– in hopes God gets the difference.

Masks Off

Hot, and this afternoon thick enough to spoon. The neighbor’s day-long humming mower melts to a tenor whir, voice of an empty silver airplane, flying straight south– somewhere affordable– over and far gone before drawing dogs out to bark. You’d think I’d be better outside, but it’s a griddle. Veiled sun burns the pale off skin like mine. I can’t breathe with all of that in the air– or with this mask. Every day sees everyone’s shadows– all around me– they’re too torpid to open a door, to let air in or out. I’m happy not ventilating, that I’m hid away in woods. But this virus squeezing out life is dead, not like we who murder by thoughtlessness.

Even at subzero temperatures, snowflakes are ephemeral because they sublimate. … no one design was ever repeated. — Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley

Now the wet snow is dropping straight down like a plumb bob. And flakes are stripping dull-gray morning from the air, settling softly on it, defying gravity in its blinding silence. This storm rolled in late, so it could be still yesterday. Birch trees burdened by the load surrender. The drifting looks like a frigid beach scene, white dunes I stumble and fall into. My full-color radar map was not like this Oldenburg marshmallow deck, tattoos of dog prints dancing on bird seed. Morning could bring the plows, salt, sand, or snow. Now, just now, turn to yesterday’s joy and ruin, going long or coming up short. Tomorrow’s cadavers or ripe old age and in love or lost alone. Here is a place where nothing can hide. And see– a snowflake settles onto my palm, its intricate design sculpted from hexagons of water cradled in icy clouds. And its message is all mine. I read on with an anxious breath, and so now it changes to rain.

Naming the Stones â&#x20AC;&#x201D; in memory of Monica Hand

So, lionhearted poet, our skies go aground: Through a cool room, a jittery ambulance, a chrome calvaria. So out, up, twisting, into low clouds lightly, like you, and nothing close to what my words sayâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; late, angry, heartsick. You sought the buried, lives all but forgotten. You plowed the untilled fields, and they grew into tongues of fire, of pride, beacons of dirty history. Unearthing their names you sang songs to them. Mother of the dark past, we hear your lullabies.

After 32 years with the U.S. Postal Service, Monica became a gifted poet, playwright, and muchloved teacher at Stephens College. She discovered unmarked headstones at the very back of Missouri cemeteries, documenting forgotten Black lives, and she helped them tell their stories. 7

Selfie at Nauset Light

Above the beach I stand, but long to sail out through these shuttered eyes. I turn to see the broiling core two thousand miles below. I know some fear the looking down, the drop. I fear I’m one of those– when artifice of ground evaporates, magnesium white remains like cloud-fish floating over shores. The corpses of the fallen dance tattoos– in counterpoint to drowning cries the gulls are mocking. I’m imagined in a ketch so gunnel-set in waves the lunacy invents, yet safe inside a waxing moon-lit shell. The lighthouse dark, we only hear the tide, the strong religion of the pulse inside.

The lost and found department

Just 1/200,000,000th of a pound of gravitational attraction is all we felt, but chestnut curls around your unexpectant face pulled at me just like fifty-thousand suns. In these days, so many revolutions have passed. Your heat and radiance warm a far-flung wilderness in foreign land. Text lacks emojis. FaceTime is decaf coffee, Miller Light. After the seasons, suns, the rains out of veiled clouds, a bone-dry summer, you are finally here, flanked by dogs whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve defended your heart against the wolves of loneliness. Will they allow approach of someone whose scent is unknown, that has long dissipated from blankets and clothes? Will you find me, new-wrinkled, soft, but still behind my eyes?

Sonnetto 4: Both Sides

Snow on spring’s first day blankets a waking ground. Still, fiddleheads meet sun. Can mud be verdant, lush, alive as flowered fields? Or sunbaked to brick? Dogs bark at the wind that bows down trees then calms: hand caressing face. Old shed, blood-spattered? The forsythia shivers– cardinals return. Life’s beauty– the difference Between breath and its silence.

Sonnetto 2: Six acres, Vermont

Six spiders in sun. Were they too eager for spring? Snow will talk to them. Dogs bark at nothing. Six deer arise from the trees, Hearing just hunger. Days grow until six. Spring is numberless– the buds Will not be counted. You’re six months away. No bloodless electrons are That heat from your skin. I dream you, at season’s end, Dressed in hot colors of leaves.

Balloon Seller

Though black and white, she stands midnight blue. A perfect vertical bow on her sateen apron cinches her waist. Thin latex worlds, being what they are, must be sold with gravity, thus, a pointed-toe pose. Her pride is reflected in a cloisonnĂŠ circle around her throat and her white enamel eyes, but she shields the truth of her hands in her apron top and behind her back. Dark green balloons, full to near bursting, bunch captive around a besom holder. There, a thin wooden chair, holding her wares for the photographer (he's promised to buy them all), struggles to hold still, like the baize pool table in The Night CafĂŠ, an animal straining not to skulk away, off the print, to the bazaar, while it's still light.

Marchande de Ballons

Small Trades, Irving Penn, 2009

The Fool (M. Févre) A son of Napoleon, his father in the Guard, for whom the world is 1814. A soft-edged top hat sits back on a high dome of a head that is gently balanced on a black long–coat. Two gray rows of buttons march down to a high waist, barely visible through the mire of 1950. He's standing, the weight to the back foot– in second position? His oil-slick shoes are clearly twice the size of the soft, manicured feet they are hiding. Perhaps mother knew the need, or maybe, he whispers:

le fou doit rester debout. A wedge of starch white cleaves his puffed breast, an obsidian stud pierces his heart enisled still. He is built up from his ball-peened chin; his marble cold eyes lodge in corners of defiance; concealed at his back is a fancy-tipped scabbard, threat cleverly half-shown. He says presently: yes, I have dueled with those who affront my honor. I have scarred them for their offense.

Le Fou Small Trades, Irving Penn, 2009

Take 42

You remember the time that we really met? Our 90’s hair avatars, children attached, and we, sort of free, in that stale 14-feature lobby? Jupiter has spun near twice around our native star. So short a feel for such long miles. And yet somehow I needed the stardust to reach here. Now turn me around, draw closed the space-black curtains of your I’s. Listen to my scratchy newsreel voice recapping a story in stuttering frames, in the back of an empty confessional: I push my life like a screen door whose shape billows as days repeat. Spinnaker, husband of the wind, sweeping across your threshold, scuffing over a foot-carved stoop, wrapped in words of eyes, hands cradle my face rushing past shoals, rusty coral, then to empty ocean– our ultramarine. Hold me under.

Bloodwork

Your reporter head understands we are who we are, just dustier, creaky, and shrunken. And, like in a canvas strait jacket, it is all twisted up tight into a convoluted reality no one would pay to see. You were on the deck. Thick fall dusk cradled you and our last-child puppy. Trees stood still, but rattled like in an early fall wind. Letting her down, you turned around and back into the empty August nightfall. Wings, feathers, eyes condensed in murky dusk, blood lust flying out of bushes. For warm fur of a rabbit kit? The owl’s talons marked your cheek. To save the pup, a stumble back and pirouette into a forgotten metal pipe. Wordless, tearless, you slumped down onto the deck, pushing away the help, white fireworks sliding across your eyes. Like pulling your two sons tight into a still, lightless house at the very end of a rutted dirt road. Just you and them. But this is not that. The blood pools in the tear on your leg, and drips over its banks onto the dark deck, pouring out because there’s no room inside to hold it. Migraine lightning shoots, head to wrists. Things spin. Families are blowing away like leaves. Any comfort of words is raked by hard-splintered steps. Maybe blood’s needed to remind us of out and in– except times when they’re the same. Now I can’t remember whose words these are. Spoken? Heard? Is anything true left but hearts?

Maze

For a slime mold, the world is a combination of two fields: gradients of attractants and gradients of repellents. The slime mold simply follows the gradients. This is how it calculates the shortest path. Andrew Adamatzky, Unconventional Computing Lab, UWE

With such a name, a passion’s hard to sell. No nerve, no brain, but mathematical. Not fungus, animal, or plant. One cell or hundreds more– all changeable at will. Its filamental life, spread out to see, affords a patterning computer minds can trace. This twisting tendril poetry contains a universe our creature finds. That push and pull drags us into a maze whose exit gift is no surprise. Your hair– we’re holding kids– my eyes slide up your dress to yours. In hazel shades you ask who’s there? : Sweet mindlessness, that algorithmic trove, well-learned and well-forgot, that ends in love.

Susurration

I have a sheet that looks like a brick wall. It helps me decide just how hard it will be to fall asleep. I don’t imagine a morning– after months the mortar’s still holding fast. Our grandson is learning to use his face. He rotates through all the emotions in seconds. As we talk, he carefully watches my mouth, replying in the joy of not needing any words. The horseweed in the garden grows quietly, green, like my hair, white. Without the color of words’ faraway hum, would you know us? Facetime isn’t hips or corners of the mouth. We agree in well-crafted words on the things that are between us. Call-and-response holds little comfort, though our language tastes as sweet as your tongue, as my day touches dark. Errant breezes push through fragrant pine late in the day, picking up, and dying perfect still– sounds like rain, a river, your breath in my ear. Winds sweep the woods, empty, just for now.

Seven, Winter

Dark juncos on snow huddle around pinecone seeds, vanish white in flight. Sun sneaks over pines while winter shakes the sky clean. Who will win today? Yellow Fisher plow pushing back insistent drifts leads lines of cars home. Snow dresses the trees bending the strongest to ground. The sun lifts their load. Amputated limbs: branches surround stands of birch broken by softness. Evening blows out sun, and cold embraces the pines. Winterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hands hold tight. Fireworks burst from logs. The hearth glows as wood is eaten, but the house keeps cold.

Fall

to Eve

asleep apart at the seams / on deaf ears out of love between the cracks / by the wayside flat on my face downstairs / to pieces into disfavor from grace / for it off a cliff on hard times / into line back on into disrepair / in love

Sonnetto 1: The Fall

Why does the robin sing in this early darkness? Can she see you here? Pandiculating, I stretch hands and arms awake and encircle you. From your side of bed I hear images. I write all I can recall. Dawn is so lazy, but I wake before the thrush in hopes you call me. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think that I long for you like hungry deer for apples.

Sonnetto 3: The Comfort

The purpose of dawn is gone now. Dog alarm clocks unwind in darkness. They are all shaved down, mat-free and alien, like failed CRISPR hybrids. My mirror’s empty. November’s too weak to light what I am since spring. Falling— broken glass scattered like constellations. Each star cuts cleanly. Then there are the Northwest tribes who spin dogs into blankets.

The Window

Wrapped round my table in a warm cell, I’m free to close watch– the clarity of bare ground slowly lost in snow, sweeping horizontal. The green flag, snapping, slaps a wicked north wind. Distracted from sunflower, birds smell within rich mud a promise of green vitality. A strobe of flashing wings? Chickadees poach one seed at a time and then evaporate. Nuthatches graze, the siskins wrap tight around the thistle. Hunger-art is a stubbly field. All birds in all of us, we’re tangled in a diametric flight, painted in photons– at once on each side of the window: same/different, so in and out. Past glass nothing has wings– birds are broken by the trying. But you are feeder and I am seed, each given to the other. And I am the watcher who is listening, and telling you all I see. You fly, from feeder to the woods, like some youtube screen, time sliding across it. And what does the hawk see?

Lay Bare the Muse

Through the windows, birds are making the usual boasts and warnings. Sun creeps along the floor, pretending that everything is normal. And on the desk, on the desk is a lumpish pile, upholstery or ruined leather maybe, so thick and dead it’s hard to know if anything is there. But the two frayed straps are well done-up and seem to be girding something meant to stay inside. Strangeness crawls up my arms and down into my chest— my day needs to be more than this, this way. Back to the bag, I find the straps and start to work at the unbuckling. That done, hands on knees, I push forward and up, peering down at the load to think of the premise. The room is brightly lit. The desk is the dream wherein things were happening that needed knowing, but the murk is so dark, so viscous, nothing can be made out. Here’s the anticipatory set: I am as past why because I am here, inside. Sharp things that cut quietly and deep in just the thinking. Or electrical charge enough to stop a heart, quick-poison creatures bristling painful teeth and claws. Splashed vials of lye and acids to dissolve my nails and fingertips. Or that which would blind and stop breath— that would draw and quarter— that would erase every single bit. Nothing.

Crystal Path

Even then, in frozen morning mist, birds boiled around the feeder. A flicker arose within the shadowed pines and grew close. The noise was a car hitting a tree. She flew straight in and flat onto the gray deck, her cheetah coat with gilt wings glowed. She was gone before I could get outside before her wings stopped shuttering. I picked her up into my hands like a baby or a heart, and ran into the winter, no coat or gloves into razor wind, depending on warmth I still felt within her. Though we had early snow, the ground, as if it knew, had yet to freeze hard. Her spot was four steps off of our stone firepitâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; that place we wrapped around each other when everything is here, and normal. I cut a circle of sod with a sharp spade, like opening a can, and cleared out smooth space between two roots, a cold pyre to rest her in, then quickly sealed the ground upon her with my boots, sidestepping down to press her tight into the earth. And this morning I held the memory in my palm, the heavy lightness of not-skin, not-fur feathers, looking into the smooth gray parchment lids, still fresh with light. Then I asked her What drew you here to this moment. Was it a reflection of early morning sun, the illusion of your sister long gone, or a crystal path through to the insideâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; tell me. Having lost so much, did you need to remind me to practice again?

Expiration Date This evening I was sitting cross-legged, stonewashed jeans, clean white cotton t-shirt, and I was painting a chicken blue. I had tried acrylics and worked up a nice cerulean, but since my plucked roaster was fridge-cold, it shed plastic flakes. Now I only use tempera. The bird is my prom date corsage, and I am very careful with my brush. I get to the wooden screen door of your house– nothing like the house on Edgewood Ave. The couple watching tv isn’t your parents. You step out onto the porch. * This is the place where I describe how beautiful you look. * The chicken is free-range organic. I have taken biochemistry. I know organic is hydrocarbons with oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur attached. But that’s not what people mean. The idea is clean life: things have been suckled with the purest water, nourished with the sweetest food and air, untouched by the hands of people. In you, organic is an aura. Your beauty arises from hazel and chestnut and silk— and so I catch my breath. Free-range means animals wander at will, thinking how wonderful it would be to dance over to lie under a shady maple on a hot day, or to drink muddy water from a rutted farm road, or maybe move to Boston with your best friends. Really, this means farmer walks you to the dream-dashing machine: no anesthesia or goodbye. For us, free-range is just how we first met…. No time to lose, we rocket off to prom in a British-racing-green roadster. But the high school isn’t one– no fake palms and no crepe paper. This is a Pinterest convention, or maybe an OR.

As crowned queen and king, we’re slowly ushered down crimson carpet steps to a stage with a stainless-steel table, wrapped in chairs. Everyone around us is painting chickens. The elderly– the more experienced– are working on multicolor turkeys using very large brushes. The painters are cherished lovers, parents, and friends, all those who’ve passed. Passed as if it were a kind of test that everyone aces, or past as if in some way we move from the present to next week, or next year, or now where things are different than before. When people leave, we hold to each other and decide. We always wash the bodies, cleaning off traces of what it was like to be here. We dress them, carefully anointed, in what we think will fit elsewhere— a white cotton shirt, glowing in the flames like a newborn sun, stone-washed jeans, melting into fresh-turned earth.

Goldberg on Wednesday J.S. Bach, 1741 / Glenn Gould, 1951

Ships full of immigrés pour Chinese men onto the shores of what they called Jīnshān, Gold Mountain. Some discover ore, the rest make San Francisco streets their wilderness. A hundred years, five thousand miles before, some boy’s agreed to play the harpsichord to soothe to sleep a Russian diplomat– tight-built constructions on a theme, by Bach. And now, so far away, amid the noise of voices, lies, and hearts so starved of joy, I dance the climb in steps near magical. They add the time, full measure, to my soul. A fluid sound– its threads weave through the trees: ten swelling springs, a river into me.

Song of Enheduanna The dream was, as usual, my waking in the dim dark at dawn— which used to be light-desert yellow. Choruses of peepers and field crickets are gone. Then when the day’s curtains finally rise, the partridge is drumming up business, dogs are announcing something, and piles of seasoned logs are voicing split infinitives. I walk down a cart-path drive, that turns to gravel, then to a clay carved in symbols, then cement– as these things do in dreams. Now I am a big box store. The bubbling of larks, sparrow packs, partridge, slide to harpsichord twitter music in one room, then doumbek drums, lutes and lyres, and Hammond B-3’s in another. Burlap monks in plainsong, gospel, hip hop posses here; there, rooms of orchestras, riots and square dances, death metal thrash, flat-busted folk woven into Sumerian call-and-response. And then since it is my dream, now rooms of zoo-fuls of cetaceans, avians, primates and ungulates, fish and frogs, and brown recluse spiders eaten by sand vipers, slithering, barking, calling, crying or singing as they mate, attack, and consume one another. Then come many rooms of people, starving, alone, hit and run, and beaten to death, desiccated, asking mercy, babies on solid food just starting to crawl or without water, stupid and smart people in love, in debt, or dying. And as I stood, sweeping my eyes like a second hand around me, turning to get to it, the doors and walls between rooms began to sag then melt, opening it all into the idea. I came to, not yet alert, somewhere in my head. Well now, or maybe qu’est-ce que c’est, was gibt, dove sono? — I’ve misplaced the language of this dream— Sumerian, perhaps– from the very first weavers of language who had no history but wonder and praise. Does this have a meaning, free of trappings of time and place? If all are poets, who will read? If poets are just one voice in this place, what is there in 4,000 years? Ur speaks to us: “what comes in cannot be equated /what goes out never ceases.” Off the ashes left of every room, a sound rises: bees in a flower-grove, her voice, being the color of the dead bodies of saints and a blinding sun on an eastern sea. She knows I’m within her hieroglyphs, singing, not knowing lyrics, to play fool in asking who or what they may be for. She sings: “something has been created that no one has created before.”

Tomorrow Six brown Jerseys browse a hillside, rippling dark fawn in August sun, working the negative space, grazing slowly against the lea’s fresh green. For them each bite’s a bit of news– alfalfa mixed with orchardgrass or meadow brome or fescue, steering clear of wild onion or dandelions. For us, when the dinner’s done, all macerated into one-in-the-same, it slides slowly down to our factory. But cows react with brown-eyed thought. What we consume is autocorrected to pink inner parts that bolster sentience. Those sweet Jerseys savor everything, chewing their cud, tasting all possibles. We aren’t cows, a-field and contented. We count all the blades of grass we eat. We hunger for more, extracting a taste; that gone, the taste of the cud; and since we are human, some concept of the cud. Was this grass or some strange decision? Poisoning and lies are not the very worst. Will there be grass tomorrow? Is it green?