this
deep shading
heavy
with singing crickets
and scents of summer
drying coriander
crushed under feet
though they walk gently
and I
whisper sing
of simple things
the ordinary
stretched across
the longing universe
resonating
and echoing it
and somehow
this voice
& the crickets calling blend
in a joined song
of metaphysics
and phenomenology
at once opposing, expanding
and complementing
one wholeness
my braided grass hair
will dry and snap to its roots–
no warmth under snow
what is human builds.
there are leopards
in our bones, hyenas
in our throats, growling
& now laughing tornado spirits
spin small midnight circles
in ripening cow corn behind my house.
i want to choose symbols for us
past 30-minute television channel mysteries
revealing the pseudoscience of crop circles
& speculating intelligence bigger
than our small heads shaping pyramids
on two continents. the joke’s
on us. did we not raise a tower so high
God blew it over like a house of cards
scattered in the breath of new languages?
what is human, makes.
there is truth in my mouth
i cannot surrender to breath. this tongue
limits me to a yes only you hear
& perhaps we too could build something
dangerously tall with these hands
if together we uncovered a voice
that would speak it into being
what is human, worships.
in other stories a man–one man
they made a god
separated earth from a heaven
that pressed us flat. we are always
feeding gods our young
choking on sky
& hunting that one thing
that can translate what is written
behind eyes, under tongues
the neanderthals buried their dead.
they lived alongside us. briefly.
carbon tells us 100,000 years ago
we mixed paints from ochre & ash.
we danced shadows through smoke,
pressed earth smooth to wood drums,
bone flutes;
braided feathers in hair
threaded with sinew
we sang.
who says what is human
could not envision stonehenge?
what is human, builds.
what is human, makes.
what is human, worships.
the neanderthals
buried their dead.
Amazing!
i run to make the fire sign
to be chased by a hundred
years of dissolving bone
beads in a government glass case
on display somewhere in Alabama.
i go to find the First-Coyote-Made-From-Water
inside the sidewalk lines of lightning bolts
full of fire ants beaming
in quiet march beyond their teeming
bowl of sand.
we go together these legs and me
sweating, panting, muscles painted
red-alive inside soft-skin corn
husks that ache and strain their roots.
we go across the green and haunted lawn
where once into an ailing building junkies snuck
and slept. they are like the coyote too but sick
with the sky-cloud disease that turns blood into
whisp and white. beneath green blankets now
sleeps the building broken down, tumbled
for a playground yellow,
red, blue.
i run to know the afters, the old man
speaking his father tongue to the young anthropologist
who writes and…
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a bang or a shout
shaped everything we are now–
was it god or chance?
Susan Daniels Poetry 