from the earth but not translated — the mud and the red
of it, the blood and the wet of it.
— Traci Brimhall
To call this memory offers no solace.
— Jane Hirshfield
This is what I know from blood:
The first language is not our own.
There are names each thing has for itself,
and beneath us the other order already moves.
It is burning.
It is dreaming.
It is waking up.
— Linda Hogan
CODA
I.
Rock paintings on rim rock in a creek canyon in John Day river country gaze as witness, as freeze-frames, to cycles of season and upheaval, to invasion of homelands and trails of dust, to spring-light green grass.
II.
Shields and suns fading
on shimmering cliff facings
refract a time of time itself
turning through …
We cannot speak
yet we see
we see the bleeding through
ages unwritten.
With what lens of time do we grasp this past? ... a then-time not departed, oscillating in the brightening-now? Witnessing catalytic displaced replaced biogeoplanet of polycrisis as political time? Economic? Geologic time or galactic? Eerily clearly Gaia days unfolding when Time is now known as only one unblinking Word. — DB
NOTES
— Traci Brimhall from her poem Translation Theory, in Saucade (2017, Copper Canyon Press)
— Jane Hirshfield. From her poem Waking This Morning Dreamless After A Long Sleep, in Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001, Harper)
— Linda Hogan from her poem Map, in The Book of Medicines (1993, Coffee House Press).
