Dove Fish in Stone Gathering Moss ( a text poam entree system)

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Dove Fish in Stone Gathering Moss
by Rita Dove
annotated with a text poam that is further annotated by Thylias Moss

(as presented in Minneapolis, Minnesota at a Rain Taxi sponsored celebration at Open Book (dream store-gallery-book-making-workshop) of the Poetry Society of America centennial, another stab at site specificity, to make connections between that fish, that stone and my aunt, another sibling of the six out of nine that died before their mother from a disease I was told was, at the time, European, as if that part of them warred successfully against the native part whose strength went to their appearance; that's why Blain's is in [tenacity of presence] what follows: a text piece (form of poam) of even more limited applicability than usual, specific to, peculiar to an intersection of all that meets, convenes, converges to mark each other with having come together, some of it forced, then diverges, separates without having to reconnect the same way or at all except for how the marking influenced, steered to some degree, that likely won't be known fully, where participants in the collaboration went, some of it to this blog post, more than a year later [particles of it still pulse while —blessed apparent simultaneity— echoes of a big banging cosmic event still travel in all directions, determined to connect with us].):

Oleta Adams sings Get Here:

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Dove Fish in Stone Gathering Moss

The fish in the stone
would like to fall
back into the sea

one of many puddles,
billions of luminous cosmic pools
can also fail
in their promise of depth

So much longing


so close to the Farm and Fleet's
assortments of toys, home basics, wild bird care,
cherry life savers as a jazzy set of monocles Belvia often held up
making an oasis of her eyes' black centers' surrender to endlessness,
eleven Farm and Fleet opportunities to get to Coon Rapids
and ping-pong all day with Anoka, the landings of her most beautiful days
splashing a genetic puddle full of only near resemblances
flickering on the water's surface as if nothing is more grand
than to sparkle: say oh and ah to brightness
even if just a single megaton bomb exposing its bubbling--pretty near effervescent
--guts: an explosion of newly forming fins, evolutionary artistry since 1955
how true it is that if you can't find it at Blain's Farm & Fleet,
you don't need it, certainly not to shine

—you see above the fish in stone as countertop,

cruelty and kindness of proximity to Kohler styled water that from now on just turns stone more smooth; while I spoke in Minneapolis' Open Book's sea of 2D and 3D print possibilities, nearby in Plymouth, the Green River Stone Company, this image on the left from the web page about them, had already been fishing the shale in a private Wyoming quarry in order to Supply Fossil Fish Murals and Stone Products for Interior Design —Fossil record of evidence of opulence, my onions diced on the complex surface of chances, knife marks and their role models of fossil fin structure make good on parallel worlds. Green River fish in stone escape the wearying analysis to come for the Dove fish (keep reading); these rest pretty
with a hope of mistaken identity as fancy mutant feathers of alternative stone scriptures—

Yes; it could have been routine pistil, stigma, sepal, a week-old petal
mapped with creases of opened origami _{a net} on an Anoka wicker table with Aunt Belvia in cap and gown, highest honors, a picture I could look like,
if drained of just about all my color: I’m Muddy Puddle

[As Walela sings in I Have No Indian Name (buy at iTunes, Amazon), I have no Indian name though I was named by an Indian. There are names for the specifics of my mix, but I don't use them; they don't help me know me better. This I understand (as I did saying this at the Open Book in Minneapolis to celebrate this understanding within a celebration of the Poetry Society of America's centennial): I'm forkergirl of the muddy puddle, the mud and bifurcations helping me slide into and out of a host of inexact translations where sometimes I leave more than I take away, and sometimes take away more than I leave.]

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[On the right is an image of a puddle portal in Minneapolis, captured during an exchange between forkergirl of the muddy puddle, light, atmosphere, the amoeba of water (also like the splat of fried-egg-shaped aliens —Denevans— that invaded Mr. Spock who went blind, during the radiation to purge his system of them, until his own alien eyelid raised, taking the blindness with it [mine persists, left eye only —one-eye forkergirl of the muddy puddle ((muddy from a galactic tail being stirred into it before it settles down into a piece of ghetto stained glass.))])

that conceals a mix on an Anoka afternoon, flower drooping
over graduation photo frame like a lamppost trying to inject
its last light into itself leaning against my Coon Rapids aunt's chin's
witness to a fish in stone,
geologic origami folding the planet into a pop-up book:
mountains, silos, and Mount Olympus theme park coasters popping out
like other badly kept secrets of the most powerful trance I know:
Memory
too will granulate, to be flecked and scattered all over the place, universal placement
of constellations, bright enough to fill, but don’t, the universe
of glowing traces of identity my aunt gave to Huntington's,

movement that with enough distance reduces to shimmer:
What every net cast fails to catch.

[The fish] is weary
of analysis, the small
predictable truths

--if only worlds smashed, when a puddle is trampled,
could bleed or trumpet
and not just ripple an attempt to transmit messages
across light years of prairie-flat space

all chokeberried out, replete with Saskatoon berry bushes, needle and thread grass shimmering like fledgling wings experiencing what looks like delight below cascades of brightness rippling over fields as mock swarms of birds changing direction to unheard music, the profound human deafness that confronts most vibration, molecular frenzy deep in the rock stroking the fish, laying down rutted outlines of seismic devotion, held as securely as those in eighteenth century lunatic asylums —what is hungriest there

or just across the reflecting pool on the mall in DC where

He is weary of waiting
in the open,
his profile stamped
by a white light

clean white coats

(image from wikipedia)

In the ocean the silence
moves and moves
and so much is unnecessary!

If we would eat more soup with a fork,
we'd understand that more slips through openings
than tines can, than tines are supposed to retain;
seems we base everything to which we've given a base
on remnants, bits and pieces that shouldn't fit together
because so much is missing;

yet who can deny, lifting the fork
so limited in what it does, sharing limitations of its makers;
who can deny, the fork with its partial catch of fish remnants lifted
toward incandescence and therefore also toward
everything incandescence anoints (we say if we are generous,
anointing things almost desperately, perhaps defending against
there not really being any permanence
or meaning that can come only from that)--

As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly,
you leave marks behind, however small. And in return,
life - and travel - leaves marks on you.
Most of the time, those marks - on your body or on your heart - are beautiful.
Often, though, they hurt
— Anthony Bourdain (The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Useable Trim, Scraps, and Bones)

--who can deny those sticky gleaming bits of translucent fish bits
hanging from fork teeth like jellyfish tentacles
or bleached streamers of antler velvet,
or tatters of flags and banners,
anything can be coveted, taken
to a moment when salvage accrues significance,
anything the fork snares and keeps for just a moment
before those particles of splendid incompleteness fall
through the openings into other unseen, unproven opportunities,
perhaps —I hope so— a meaninglessness which might be the only way
to wipe off all pretense once and for all
uncovering

the moment to cast his fork of
skeletal blossom

stretch mark tines of reach
not cluttered with grasp

The fish in the stone
knows to fail is
to do the living
a favor.

He knows why the ant
engineers a gangster's
funeral, garish
and perfectly amber

unrequited request for sainthood, lack of recognition
keeping the amber coffin free of corruption, sacred impossibility,
antiseptic, sacred vacuum

He knows why the scientist
in secret delight
strokes the fern's
voluptuous braille:

Aunt Belvia's eyelids veined with stick figure statues,
stick figure promises of ho-hum basic stop motion animation
making us weep, simple Jesus remnant
resisting an imprint of the penny's Lincoln Memorial
that made me wish, when I saw it with her,
that palaces were necessary

when anything can gleam briefly,
stellar magnitude
fades during every bright moment,
blasts itself away, satisfied
for having known radiance at all

Good-bye Aunt Belvia

resurrected temporarily in even brighter memory

(is this amber a chunk of wayward flame?
at home beside Lichtenberg figures of captured lightning electron paths
failing to find the god particles they are generating
while bifurcating in Lucite into forests,
each branch a mini big bang, group of revivals, more minor resurrections,
relentless risings, a general upness, bipedalism)

oh, ah, ah, ah

then it's over, a finish the ever-luminous
--even just an idea of immortality--
dulls.