Ars Poetica: Tree Mend Us
“Not the coffee you’re waitin’ for her to offer thee,” my muse rang me
on the blue plate poetry hot line, “but the life story you need shine warp-speed
with right now. Drop Miss-A-Mess impressed by the power of less onto your
‘gotta go’ list, win me with long-lastin’ love witness on the always built for
more metaphor express: passion unpreventable once in outpour affluent, a
wonderwall in waterfall exuberant. Don’t you know so much depends on a red
wheelbarrow beside white chickens glistenin’ up through the winged spring of
May, so I got a hunch April’s not the cruelest month. Hey, listen: beyond a
lunch pail Aristotle, there’s a human throttle & when you embrace me please
we equal infinity face-to-face. As for goin’ with the flow & ridin’ the tide, the
truth’s in the motion of the ocean, yo, come mountain top tip straight from the
temple to Isis, that is, know thyself & see-heal-glow-feel helter-skelter-no-
shelter’s full eclipse a moon disc stops the sun with & descend with me the
depths.”
“Easy for you to say,” I said, “but I’m afraid of the dead. Furthermore,
bein’ like water & seekin’ the lowly has got me on all fours & I’m sinkin’
slowly. As for love, it’s already torn me to shreds.”
“Babypop, lose your art or show some heart: Dismemberment’s got this
one advantage---ya get to see all the parts. A war’s on, son, so to the Lady’s
cause run to stand under the understanding slipped through the gates of Eden.
Shade’s the oasis of the highway & love’s the secret revealed only in
beholding it, so lay low, son lover, lay low, the hills shimmer like the patterns
our own stilled bodies make in big happy soil song after the rains torrential,
take me to that monsoon reason if you’re movin’ a mountain to Mohammed
this season. Ye need send us to Tree Mend Us where old growth forests ring-
tell a tale’s end in a mouth’s beginning, singing what’s born in nature doesn’t
die, only changes shape & size. Beyond reductive norms called attached-to-
your-own-form bring me along eight lunar phases: virgin & fertile, curious &
seductive, ecstatic & abandoned, exhausted & wise.”
—Kirpal Gordon