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1. HOW YOU CAME TO BE
"Before there was a world
Before this pin-head planet
Was spinning in the heavens
Before there was a heaven
The Great Spirit was sprinkling
The vast immensity of the universe
With cosmic dust.
And it so happened that
A whiff of the Great Spirit's breath
Was caught in a stray dust cloud
And in the mingling
Of breath with dust
In their convulsive whirling
Planet Earth was born.
To this day
That sparkling whiff of
The Great Spirit's breath is
Trapped in the bowels of earth
Restless in a bed of flames.
Long before life had taken shape
A spark of the trapped breath
Little Spirit
Was rising through the crusting folds of
A fire-spitting earth and
Tugged at by rustlings of things-to-come
It aligned with the powers that be.
Taking the path of least resistance it
Surfaced on the face of a world
Over which Sun and Moon
Hold reign.
Sun noticed
And blinded by its attention
Little Spirit fell back into darkness.
Restless ever since
Little Spirit shuttles between
The radiant internal source of energy
Wherefrom it sprang and
The possessively dark material world
That holds it trapped.
Shuttling non-stop
Little Spirit stitched the worlds
Of matter and non-matter together.
Attraction—
Daughter of the Great Spirit
She with a thousand fingers at the fringes—
Took hold of their union and
To this day this Primal Union is
Everywhere immediately at once
Sustaining life and kindling change
In the smallest of the small on earth
And in the largest of the large."
*
"Attraction was in attendance when
Moon first saw his reflection
On the dark belly of Water.
Admiring himself from on high
Moon charmed Water to the depths
Of womb-darkness.
Seeing Water swell with desire
Attraction spun an arc between them
Desire tiptoeing across the airy divide
Urging to make things new—
Desire teaching Water
To change appearances.
At the prenuptial hour of dawn
Carpets of dew appeared
On the dark side of earth
Moon dancing in every droplet.
Mist rolled in to gather the fickle lover
And delirious with longing
Mist lifted its foggy head
Tossed armfuls of dew at the sun
And by mid-day
A procession of full-bodied clouds
Was marching across the blue
To welcome the rising Moon.
Come evening and
Clouds billowing with expectation
Flocked to cushion
The jagged mountain peaks.
At midnight Moon
Slipped under the quilted covers
But not for long—
Dawn raised an eyebrow and
Moon resumed its roving ways.
Heartbroken
Water spilled tears into the ocean of
Longings and weak in limb by then
Water fell back into the lap
Of earth.
Ever since
Whatever holds a taste of water
In its makeup knows
The power of Attraction
By heart.
This is how Attraction
Tenacious stubborn patient
Came to rule the world."
*
"In the brooding silence
Of cosmic time
After tumultuous convulsions
After explosive collisions and confluences
In every waterlogged sheltered hollow
In the mingling of dust and water
Possibilities mutated into beginnings
That clustered into seed.
Left to their own devices seeds swelled
Split open pushed up a sprig a bloom
Sprays of seed inseminating the world entire—
Sap rushing into the veins of plants
Blood in the veins of flesh let
Vapor escape material trappings—
The circular ways of water begetting
The circular ways of matter."
*
"Now as then
Every permutation craves for
The life-begetting elixir
Pulsing in the primal union of
Light and Darkness and Little Spirit.
Now as then
Each thing in existence
Robs others of their breath
And is in turn zapped of its own.
Now as then
Nothing escapes the clutches of
This gruesome exchange
That makes each living thing either
More or less of itself or part
Of some other thing.
Nothing on this earth
Is ever lost or gained or wasted
Not even your insignificant life.
In the recycling
Life invites death and Death invites Life.
In death the mundane is sublime,
In life the sublime is mundane
The link unbroken
To this day.
This is how
In the shadowy underbelly of this world
Attraction
Rearranges appearances in earnest.
This is how
I and you came to be."
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