Autogeography: a set of three poems
I. Pillar
A woman once cursed me that I am a pillar
so she could ignore the half of my girth made of caulk-stuffed cracks,
turning away as their spidery fingers stretched further with each quake.
The heat and pressure of time have polished my surface, marbled and glossy.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like as a sedimentary rock.
I picture the logic of the segregated layers that present themselves
with Norman Rockwell clarity.
Here is where she was born.
Here is where she lost her virginity.
Here is where she became what she is today.
Standing at the top, the group of guided tourists would leave
secure that they knew no less than all there was to know.
But even if I try to sneak in the back of this group,
let myself be numbed by the anesthetizing air conditioning
and impassive fluorescent lights,
I cannot find my own fossil record.
I am an igneous rock at best.
I spread my steaming magma limbs down the side of the mountain;
my twisted asphalt skin insinuates a comforting age and solidity.
But please, step to one side.
If you push the ashes with a stick
my skin will slide off like the crusty charcoal of a burnt marshmallow,
and my red hot sugar paste will slide out again,
drawn ever closer to the bottom of the sea.
When I hit the water my form will be frozen
and I will tumble down the sides of eel-infested crags.
I'll wait for the aimless currents and nibbling crabs to break me down.
Let me mix with the soft ocean floor.
Then if you will lay your sediment over me,
we could travel,
free from the sculptors and architects
who would dismiss us with a shape.
II. Beach
I have wanted to be buried in sand.
The cooling pressure has weighted me down,
and I was soothed to feel I could not move,
and that the entire earth supported me.
But my feet cannot grip the ground
as I try to fly through dunes.
The particles run through my toes faster than I can
away from the force of gravity.
I am always pulled back down.
One would think by now the saltwater sting
in my scraped knees would have made me satisfied
with walking along the shore,
tracing my own path,
not minding who had walked this beach before.
That is the waves' job,
to lap each mark back into their insatiable mouth.
They know that every drop will come back,
and that it is our lot to be thirsty,
despite our composition.
My mouth is parched,
both when I build my tower, and knock it down.
Because the world does not need me to construct
what is already there.
I must look at my reflection and live
the ripples and distortions that flicker
on the waves.
I must remind myself
that not only am I standing,
looking down,
but I am also submerged,
and that it is my face straining on the surface.
III. Naming
The naming tells us as much about Adam
as it does the animals.
It says that he saw a difference between a lion and a tiger,
and yet accepted them as cats.
Was Linnaeus striving to landscape his unruly world into a garden?
I cannot deny enjoying the feeling of security
that comes with sinking my foot
into the comforting histories laid out before me.
I relish the deception that the view from a tower is more encompassing than the ground.
We may regard with our eyes, but have little for them.
We do not trust that the immediate can be as true.
So we live for the micro and tele,
in an attempt to become intimate
with what was already within our scope.
If it is accessible, how can it be good?
Haven't we been told that this is East?
Even so, we share an axis around which we both spin.
Though we travel through velocity and disparity,
we both look up to the same north star.
And the genesis of genus can unify the kingdoms.
