The Outpost

A

There was wax all around us. We sweated
wax the way a horse laps trough water.
A deep flame. Earlier in the sun of shift
we had drunk rain from clear sky. Now we
doused the fire with long blue streams of piss.
And, there was the trick of who we are,
without a history, because we are ancestor.
Always.

B

We swing the hand-held devices in the air,
wood, bark, sap, old.
Above our heads we write a whirring song:
we were born in rotting logs, in windy praying
fields, at the bottom of looking glass lakes,
two skies above us.
Some hatched in a burst of light.
Others entered the world through stamens,
surrounded by bright yellow, magenta, milk.
And again, others cracked open the soft
domed smiles of woman. And peered out.

C

We slept beneath pussywillow, our heads
resting on the softly curled jaguarundi.
We had no way of tracking. We sat
at the center, only a sense of the
labyrinthine, that everything touched
everything else. Beyond the composition
of fence, of hut, house, room and window,
beyond the village of boundary, ownership,
the breakage, the loss, the very last thing,
were ones like us, living where a line grazes
the edge of the circle. We stand in clearings,
waiting for the shattered, the shortness of
breath, the skipping of hearts, the questioning.

D

I wear a black hat and I will take you back
to the beginning:
And there amidst the wax, the feathers,
the phosphorescence,
I will return from the shining world,
with an answer.