saliva dripping slowly

by Ambon Pereira

Posted to Poetry on 2003-05-27 01:26:00

Parent message is 456724
when i was a little boy i wanted to be an archaeologist
to prove the past; proof is what i wanted, then,
a reason to believe in the world and humanity and
myself among them.

but it would seem the closer we come to what it was and is,
this life, the more we find ourselves
in the tenuous grip of desire upon reality;

and i suspect that the heaviest religion
is the desire
to hold it all;
even to hold ourselves
in being held.

——–

your mention of a squirrel reminds me
of a clay model of that animal which i recently
spied upon, in the National Museum in Delhi–

the statue was very small, no more than a thimble,
sitting on its bushy tail as if upon a throne,
nibbling on a nut; it was perhaps
three thousand years old,
a fragment of the Indus Valley civilization;

the forests must have grown thick across the subcontinent,
then; forests as dark and full as the Amazon;

the other day it occured to me
that Brazil will probably look something like
the Northern Plains of India, once they’ve finished
the hacking and burning;

the Northern Plains look a lot like Mars;
a wasteland, a sick earth with a fever on the wind;

i suppose i stray a bit far from where i started,
a squirrel,
digging furiously,

long after the thing is done.

————–
yes, the stars have seen it all,
unblinking, a plumb-line
infinitely unreeling
into an abyss:
namely, a mirror.

but perhaps i’m only just talking nonsense again,
as i often do.

may this find you well,
Ambon