Because it’s instinct
to bring a small gift
when you visit
I want to leave oranges for the chimpanzees
in the zoo’s primate house
But not really oranges
and not people things
Mysterious, monkey-right things
Out of some indebtedness
Same thing for the lions
who don’t get to silence
live things between their teeth
Or maybe it’s an unromantic
overwhelming awe
which demands action:
unpacking my human mind
laying it out on a broad stone
letting my name drop
to the nowhere it came from
so I am again a verb: lovestruck
As in dreams when ribs
open out like gates
innards rushed by light
If there’s no right commodity
to give monkeys
instead should I step small?
Is being gone a gift?
But there is this urge
to mirror back each grace
(and matter is our vehicle for gesture (for example,
a bouquet presented to a girl — the flowers themselves,
before being cut just movement; heads
flushed and rotating to the earth’s turn))
Below the barter that keeps our maps
pinned down and agreed upon
it is very likely
that we are loved intimately and impersonally
down to the moving cell-grain
by a centripetal force
that has no stake in maintaining
our current plans and bodies
but waits for us, a broad and intractable net
This desire to give concrete offerings
to water, color, armories of trees
is more than a trading desire
Cut a slice of love from the air at your left
and eat it
— 5 Comments —
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Jack Bastian
14 Jun 2009 5:46 pm
Laurel, I really liked that. Especially the last line. Sometimes Jane sleeps cuddled in my left arm, and I can feel her love in the air.
Robin
3 Jul 2009 2:01 pm
Lauren, that was fabulous! It sounds like something I’d write. I love how you have tapped into a visceral feeling of connection with sometime wild, in the context of being friends with them. It’s like it’s natural that we would feel such a connection. You captured that so neatly, so succiently. I will keep this poem to read again and again. Thank you for this gem. Robin
jana collin
6 Jul 2009 7:53 pm
Laurel - I love the picture you’ve painted to describe this relationship with the creator. Irreverence and awe so intense that grasping to matter for expression is the only human option for understanding. Very nice. There was a teetering point for me in this poem, on the line “to mirror back each grace” I was almost lost and abandoned the poem but once making it through the stanza I felt momentum through the end of the poem.
Marvin R. Hiemstra
8 Jul 2009 7:28 pm
Your respect for the World and all therein is quite astounding. I especially love
If there’s no right commodity
to give monkeys
instead should I step small?
Is being gone a gift?
Thanks for the intense pleasure of reading your poem
James Eric Watkins
8 Aug 2009 1:52 pm
A nice sentiment that culminates with
This desire to give concrete offerings
to water, color, armories of trees
is more than a trading desire
And to point out a bit of nicely executed imagery
As in dreams when ribs
open out like gates
innards rushed by light
All in all, a good read.