“We came to the foot of a hill and there I saw a cave. Then Great-Mountain went down / into it, for a ladder was standing in it. I was next to him. / LE’lpila was last. As soon as I went down I heard / something like the rushing sound of a river. Now I came to the (1) stone floor of the inside and it was like a house which was dark. Then I was taken hold of by Ha’daho and he made me sit down where / hemlock branches were. For a long time none of the shamans spoke.”

 George Hunt, “I Desired to Learn / the Ways of the Shaman /” (20)

*****

inside the meta-
physic cave, where dark-
ness feeds on us
and magic lanterns speak
of platonic en-
trapments
(which catch you 
and fling you into
horrendous suns 
blinded by logo-
centrism)

figures carved in sound
& rivered in fowl speech
rush by, erase the edge-
work of our craft, 
blur our knowledged
faces into fine
dust 
& our lovelinesses
melt away in the unsounded
depth, mastries
galatean or otherwise,
purged & consumed
like flesh in the wake
of evening alliances,
 fall away in thrushfire:

they aren’t statues 
nor totems those eye-lines
which invert our galleries  
and shine on the pathways
of shared breath;
across chance 
horizons
drawn upward
to a sudden burst
of hemlock &
its neighboring silence
of enraptured owls

(those who bridge   

the ceiling-cloud
to its 
ground)
they paint the stars
electrical
and weave strings
on the arc
of Lyra;
nor is the unkindness
of ravens
a construct of
decomposed systems,
a myth
disassembled
into signage
or “psychology”;
the weight
defies you
and holds your irises
up as a bell on gold-chain does
specks
of ravished pollen
in disordered 
light,
a disappearance
of calloused hands 
into card deck
carpet
into 
figure,
clockface
into grief;
of Heine’s gods
into refrigerator
repairmen;
the dinosaur
disappears
into a hiss
of black
swans
& 
the magpie
hiberates
in the skin
of a journalist 
who wagers
that the
next election
will end in 
failure,
a
failure
of the State
but not the 
failure
of the body 
whose
taxidermy
might save us
from embarrassment
in the museums
of an alien
anthropology;
I once ate
of human form     
&
this person I was
in the days
of metaphysical folly 
(outside the body
while in the body)
was a brown bear 
in love with the ways
of bipedal life
&   
in love with industries
of thoughtful
meat, secretly
in love
with headless
organisms who channeled
their rage
thru E. coli
& 
protozoa;
colonial lifeforms;
bacterial
gated communities;
a loveliness
of thread-
-suns stitched
into fabric
as sunspots are stitched
into baked skin; 
to be beast enough
to read scripts
on such luminous
surfaces: 
the white crest 
of a wave collapsed
on whale hump 
evaporated in
a swoon
of plankton: 
the fibers of wood
when I lick
its honeyed
lacquer in a fever
of diabetic
discomposure: 
the bees
who puncture my wool
and waltz
me toward slow
death
in the warm
red-dotted pores
that suck in 
their fuzzy incandescent
siren:
the eidolon
that rings
in the eagle’s
lensed roam
which eats of the image
before it eats
of the torn
viscera of a dormouse;
like these I am 
dispassionate,
indifferent
as a god is in the cud 
of regurgitated 
oilseed & roughage 
in the mouth 
of Kamadhenu;
and my brain runs 
wild in the aftergrowth
of jungle fire,
cannibalizing 
the remains 
of my brown kindred
in the stomachs
of white language 
whose digestion
puppets shapes
in the crude form of men
grown mad from 
colonial ennui; 
northern bison
gesticulate 
while I hunt
the ways of magic
on the periphery of their
lettered vision
their tracks
glow in a fire
whose intention lies
behind intention itself, what
is called communitas, 
the instinct for Reason’s
inordinate unreason
in a chaos of kinship
within dietary 
regimes: 
Revolutionary cannibalism
or sacral cannibalism
or cultural cannibalism
or vulgar cannibalism
or bourgeois cannibalism: 
the fulfillment
of a wish-image 
in a consumption
of parts
to a missing whole:
the parts of a butchered hog parts
of a Rolex wristwatch parts
of a case file titled “the Blue Rose
of Novalis” parts
of a magnolia
quartered in pistil stamen
calyx and corolla   
parts of speech
in Caliban’s mastery
of egyptian curses
or his creole eye 
long on the throat
of delectable dutchmen
whose language
he’ll feast on
under baroque altars
rendered holy by meta-
-morphosis of blood
into wine, 
Tonantzin into
Guadalupe, corn-gods
into Monsanto, 
conquest into 
cuisine & tourism; 
I tried to live among
the red ants but they kicked me
out, unclean as
I was, awash in 
cultures of the
indeterminate; I was not
a good worker, I 
was not ride-or-die, I 
was not scribbling epistles
and I did not beautify the names
of things with latin
umbrage; I mixed the measurements,

I growled when the undertow
came for my feet, 
and then my legs
and afterward 
my velocity; 

I sent up a lament to Them,
a poem
that begins with “A,” 
and ends in “Beloved,”
and I saw her piecing together
the long eyebrows 
of a brother-spirit, a waxen figure
lifted higher
than heaven’s forehead,
the red cedar was on
her brow blackened in charcoal
and I fell down
into my slumber
as the owl falls down
into the resistance
of its prey, its 
much loved its cherished, 
and I sank below
the whole of its multitude,
and mixed with
the warm dirt and the mucus
of the earth, 
of what contains 
all the beasts
and yet negates them,
as the night negates
a field of cows
munching soundlessly
on the grass, in which
all things are black
and purer 
than the mustard
seed dreaming
of the mountain’s
breast
at dawn’s 
climax; 
The animals
are calling
us,
our tongues
are en-
meshed
in riverspeak; 

and i wait for you
(as the crow waits
for
lustrous carrion 
on the roadways)
at the threshold
between
the stone’s
soft gaze
&
the red cedar
distances