a moment before.

readying
sweeping cleaning washing moving stacking chewing
transforming
the living room, once close and warm, is now echoy and the floors are aching for moving feet.
wondering, too,
and missing and loving
and aching and sneezing
and building and painting
making nests as we clear out hollows

"[the bride] walks to her husband's home, never looks back or she'll turn to stone."
i mean,
fuck some patriarchal short-sighted family-breaking family-defining bullshit,
but i think there's something about not looking back
after all, our history is in our skin and our skin is dead until we begin to dance.

tonight i will be gray with lust and love,
spirit-filled stone,
concrete and fantastical.
and we will dance and dance and if you doubt for a moment and turn, you will join my ranks.

b brought up a good point--
to be in nature is quite a thing,
hard to believe that it was always there and will be there whenever we want it,
or perhaps pause to wander with our eyes and hearts,
and in the mean time the city holds for us so much, something like tonight,
something like multitudinous explosions,
social experiments,
a different souvenier to take into the woods.

and like wide-eyed rabbits, strong branches, sharp thorns, tufts of grass, furry humans,
we can love many a stranger if only for a moment

the spell of the sensuous

(lots of good stuff in this book--thanks j. here's a piece.)

"...the current commodification of 'nature' by civilization tells us little or nothing of the perceptual shift that made possible this reduction of the animal (and the earth) to an object, little of the process whereby our senses first relinquished the power of the Other, the vision that for so long had motivated our most sacred rituals, our dances, and our prayers."


"but can we even hope to catch a glimpse of this process, which has given rise to so many of the habits and linguistic prejudices that now structure our very thinking?"


"certainly not if we gaze toward that origin from within the midst of the very civilization it engendered."


"but perhaps we may make our stand along the edge of the civilization, like a magician, or like a person who, having lived among another tribe, can no longer wholly return to his own.



"he lingers half within and half outside of his community, open as well, then, to the shifting voices and flapping forms that crawl and hover beyond the mirrored walls of the city."


"and even there, moving along those walls, he may hope to find the precise clues to the mystery of how those walls were erected, and how a simple boundary became a barrier, only if the moment is timely--only, that is, if the margin he frequents is a temporal as well as a spatial edge, and the temporal structure that it bounds is about to dissolve, or metamorphose, into something else."