Twice Alive

by Forrest Gander

If lichen ecology has more to do with collaboration than competition, it’s nevertheless true that collaboration is transformative.

the inevitability of death may be determined by our mammalian orientation. Perhaps some forms of life have “theoretical immortality.”

Propogation

make out the voice, if it can be • called a voice, of absence speaking • intimately to you, directly, I know

The moment of awakeness is prescence, the moment after is anxious projection into the future

that they too sensed something askew, the skip at the center of ourselves or just an inkling of abyssal unhappiness was it?

like one of those spectral white fallow deer introduced to the headlands that began to outcompete native species and so, before they were slaughtered every one by hired hunters, inciting arguments about what was native if all systems are given to change.

the sheer overabundance of the present shame which plugs up each minute and stands in now for whatever it meant to live oneself before every gesture became performance for an audience we imagine never to be finished with looking at us.

And as for the budding-out of being we’d called passion? or the sensual moments phrased into our gait when we were coming to feel something, when our shadows merged (not as romance, but the real consequence of our mutuality) with shadows of conifers along the steep ravine, and completely naked and without relief, the world parsed us into the inhuman where rosette lichen surged across rocks lacking nothing that might be needed to answer for our existence?

But it was already noon and as we looked, the colors of the hills began to blanch, and all around us, in the field of the visible, we sensed, without speaking, duration’s ebb.

the fuzz of fecal dust from lichenivorous mites triggers woodcutter’s eczema, the bane of loggers knee-deep in sweet fern sawing down cedar

cordyceps — the brown of your eyes softened with rain and remotely fluorescent — dissolve into slime after a few days, whatever we thought we were following was following us, its intention unlinked to our own

Forest

like memories are they? or punctuation? was it something the earth said to provoke our response tasking us to recall an evolutionary course our long ago

within my newborn noticing have you popped up beside me love

if briefly to a swelling vastness while our coupling begins

we fill each with the other all morning

But when her lavish face turns toward him beaming, the corners of her eyes wind-wet, he yields to that excess, he reappears to himself.

Could she glimpse what was there before you turned inside yourself?

If it takes just one more crossed-out name to complete the bitterness

Roman

some adventure in happiness if there were such a thing and it wasn’t pretend:

Our whole queue halted when you went to one knee, when you crouched at a puddle to coo to a fat toad.

what I felt then gave me cause to recall the pleasure breaking out on the faces of musicians in that pause between their last note between their last note and the applause. What you said, what I said. What we did we did until there was no interval between us.

the full moon showed up like a girl doing cartwheels.

it was a queer thing to say in a queer time we use a gender-neutral pronoun we said to which she answered Whoever thought anyone was just one thing?

if witch’s butter could learn to speak

long soft sarongs of moss ensorcel rocks treestumps up- lifts of granite and gneiss pine needles blackberry brambles arching up wet and tousled

Don’t be so rational, electronics are rational and I wondered what change I might make that my next words not be so

while I’m dogged through the day by quick sniffs of sickness, the sorghum-thick snot insists I too am a fleshy protuberance risen momently from some tangled mycelium so the dead also speak when I speak oh holy holy communion

No undertow of doubt, every part willing, the forest encroaches ashen earth (when her knees begin to jerk)

as if looking took time to happen

the distance, a broad hill of bright mustard flowers the morning light coaxes open.

as I find you within me — not fused, not bonded, but nested.

each of us excited by the volatility of the other

The reconfiguration is instantaneous experience. It is being itself.

Without you I survived and with you I live again in a radical augmentation

I predict you’ll keep to the shade of the laurels to nibble your three-anchovy-slices-over-cheese sandwich while I sprawl on a boulder in full sun sucking a pear

we are prey to the ache of not knowing what will be revealed as the world lunges forward to introduce itself

a gleaming slickenside outcrop sanctifies the path winding through a precinct of greenschists whose lethal minerals sterilize the ground

sprigs, a vascular language prior to our breathed language, corporeal, chemical, drawing our sound into its harmonic, tuning us to what we’ve not yet seen,

a litany from spore-bearing mouths as

femicides, war, righteous insistence and still and still the lived sensation

can’t you hear — Don’t be so rational — the world inhale?

epiphyte,

this is not description but an un- \ / acknowledged chapter — stuffing its cheeks / with green needles

chumbling volcanics, / \ / andesite mostly, and dacite, and rotting redwood needles that \ / lightly tremble with nematodes and some / spider-like arthropod who can name?

cross-legged on a slab of rock scribbling • into the future that holds you in it, • you are only still arriving

Forest, Pastoral, Sea, Mountain, Wasteland. The five primary landscapes of Sangam literature

“Sangam” refers to a gathering of individuals united in spirit, sharing a common vision, and, in a metaphysical sense, seeking meaning and purpose in a state of togetherness.

conviviality

Homogeneity and hierarchy are alien to a true Sangam.

the third Sangam comprises a wide range of lyrics on love that form an anthology called the “Kuruntokai.”