today all the boughs
and sticks
pitched overboard
unstored, unstoried.
Believe in Bamboo,
sharpened, burnt,
hurt.
I couldn't understand,
yet I persisted.
"While minds create things, things also create minds..." 136
what they left became buried in talcum fine loess., crushed rock dust blown from
advancing glaciers hundreds of kilometers away 146
Kindred, Sykes
In 1970, a Japanese robotics researcher named Masahiro Mori posited a complex phenomenon known as the uncanny valley. His basic theory was that we respond positively to a robot as it becomes more human in look but only up to a certain point. And then suddenly, we are strongly repelled by it.
What does it mean to create, become part of, a functional multi-cultural me?
My world is small, with big silences. My world is noisy, a city-dwelling diaspora of people, plants, and animals.
I am not rich. In America, I am poor, more so in money than spirit.
The color of my skin sometimes staves me. There's plenty of pre-judging to go around. "They should have killed you all in the war." Which one? " You're not...." Fill in the blank. " Go home!" Pull apart a genetic history. Where is the singular root place I should return to?
Living together with you, me, are the pieces of us. Just look around. We're fractured, crystallized, beautifully dark, resplendent.
Notes, stanzas, loosed music.
I take up space for better and worse, a source of emissions. Am I soluable? I don't want to be.
Silences. Then the witness sounds of red winged black birds, the robin's reaching into first light, the ever present calls of cardinals, the beating of hearts, the breathing of trees.
How to distinguish a muskrat from a beaver kit swimming in the river - two tales, two bodies in water.
When I was young, I was altered, left my body to survive. I've lived a lifetime of
putting my soul back into this aging flesh. Failure is a part of love.
Above, below, around me, ghosts remain, unreconciled.
How many tales does it take to make us whole again?
I cannot swim well. The love of my life sunk, couldn't float. We flunked a life lesson, needed a boat.
In Wisconsin, the ark is a canoe, I wrote. The boat of both the best and the worst, of those first, and remainders like me, who put to sea, found themselves here, alive, but wounded and wound into others.
I'd like to be on friendlier terms with the sea, that transported multi-cultural me, which extends still, to the horizon, and into families.
Silences can be navigational, hold a boat afloat.
Between quiet, I write notes from the voyage. Record songs.
Threw two glass flutes away.
Drank from them our wedding day.
Engraved on one:
Kevin
November 5, 1993
And the other:
Marsha
November 5, 1993
Both mothers were alive then, my father too.
Dad died, then Mom, Inez.
You:
Kevin
February 4, 2014
Mary lost Damon February 6, 2021.
She got a tattoo on her forearm today,
a rose and heart, her name, his,
the words Always & Forever.
I let it go - glass, silver stemmed,
a lily, my heart, the past.