the only wildness i know

 

the only wildness I know

 

     What I want is connection.  I want to swim in the sweet, sensual spring of connection.  How impossible and yet completely delightful and unexpected these feelings.  Suddenly spring is my focus and I’m fully given over to its excesses and tenderness. The trick of spring.  I am undone.

     The deep midnight blue of lobelia is my favorite.  Today, again in the supermarket, apparently my favorite place for sensual pleasures, I was selecting apricots.  Their softness and color seeped into my skin, seemed to flow in my veins.  I felt as if I merged with them.  I don’t know what the Foodtown security people do in cases like this, do you? 

     On a hot day full of sun, if you ask me, I’ll probably tell you that gazanias are my favorite flower.  They’re the sun, the plains, warmest Africa.  But did I ever tell you about lantana?  The smallest flowers. A sweet pain, their indelible imprints in my chest.

     The river of new thoughts are raw and green.

     Yesterday, the next day, flowers. 

     For me, the call of the wild is the longing to have wilderness left unharmed.

     I’m riding the waves.  Though I don’t know how, I know they connect to all landscapes, cool canyons, wild onions, even the prairie dog.  We know the wolves belong in Yellowstone.  They were released there to reenter the cycle.  First we pluck lives out and then place them back into the chain of being.  We knit, we sow.  We don’t really know. We need to save all the parts because we don’t know what all the parts are. We’re not just guardians now, we’re also weavers.

     Our bones, our stones, our baskets of shells and every place a place for feathers.  The wild has come inside.  Have I touched the wild in some way?  The salmon are jumping and flipping orange to the sky gods.  The frogs are gurgling mud and river blood. The loons are loony and jiving on insects and little fishies.  The water is washing silt onto the banks. There is no fragmented, segmented aspect of my being.  The river is not separate from me but a part of it all.  And that is a good thing. 

available on kindle, see freda karpf, the wild blue

thanks

  

you might not know

 

you might not know

You might not know to mourn. You might not know to pause and allow the grief. After all, the birds you see still soar. You might not know to feel the hollow ache of loss for bodies of water or animals and fish that have gone extinct. After all, the eagle still guards the river. You might not know the empty free fall through total darkness, where the wolves of time and industry have poisoned the land and put particles into the air fouling everything, your lungs and the brain cells of our children sullied, literally, polluted by these chemicals and fallout. After all, the otters still sneak past the mystery of the river.