Debranchez / Branchez
To acknowledge what I am must be painful for some sludge brain
Who points and suggests that I be something other than an orchid.
No one here is meant to be that, it seems to whisper. Go be a violet say, or Queen Annes Lace or sometimes a bumblebee, horsefly, a shrew pup, a scrabbled and curled up leaf.
Thats part of why I want to leave sometimes
As if the inherent disrespect for some insignificant designation given to me on sight, can’t help but make certain people audacious with advice,
-and in the tone of an all knowing power proclaim what all the flowers ought to be or that they be beans. I’m ripping up my tracks with Oscar Peterson sized brilliance, blooming and blossoming, overflowing in cascades, bright. A rarity, a gift.
Later the rain takes me.
I stand in it for hours
Dancing, the firefly coming to speak to me of divine messages, grace, power, destruction, inspiration, will, the sun, the source
Feeling the chill, the wet that goes to my bones
I can’t stop thinking about the matriarchal society and so we do recitations of compliments, honesty, illumination, healing, inner light, guidance, the moon. Afterward I stand in the shower, feeling the gradual change to warm water. Earlier I caught a vulture, it’s wings raised to fly, resembling the horns of the ram or a faun.
The green and gold surrounding us and my thoughts scrubbed thoroughly in the rain,
Like so often as I grew up in the country, I would rise in the middle of the night or day and go out into the rain and play. I would lay down and feel myself, a person, alive.
8 thoughts on "Debranchez / Branchez"
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I love the lush, natured details here and the rhythms of this piece.
Beautiful. Vivacious. Pensive. Grounding. Wild. I feel the blooming. I feel the roots and the petals unfurling. I feel Fergus and the Druid and Cadence Goddeu and the burning soul of something gleaming in many things. It’s raw. It’s ornate. It’s a soul-stirring odyssey moving from orchid misapprehended by those stanle-bound dwarves in the last battle to Peterson breaking free from Montreal to a swollen and glorious communion with fireflies, moon, and all things natural, and finally, with the Olympic gymnast’s grace, alighting on where we are most ourselves, most whole, back home in our childhood. Epic. Glorious. Jeepers—jeepers.
And that’s just scratching the surface. Thank you for this.
*Cad Goddeu
*stable-bound
Had to look up the title, also. Very appropriate. Kind of underlines the Peterson thing also, him being a Quebecois.
Love the swooning mystery here, like Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night. Maybe you’re learning from Goldie, too.
Jerielle’s is a genius all her own. An embarrassment of riches, gifts, and genius. She’s the Hyperion to my satyr.
Thank you Goldie, I appreciate that so much! I chopped up 5 poems I wrote yesterday and sewed them back together into this.
Kevin Nance, you do have a point there. I was thinking Goldie’s style creeped in a little bit on one line there about the curled leaves. He is too great a poet to remain immovable to his words.
That said, I see that I influence him too! 😉