Anne Waldman: Excerpts from 'Jaguar Harmonics' [person woven of, of tesserae]

“and I// hear all, the new moon new in all/ the ancient sky”
-- Charles Olson

“a place where all the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum”
-- William S. Burroughs

of tinsel?
     You want to say insulated
nary scold a child-woman made of
     of what? of person!
Nay nay go down all a hook of lumen
It makes “of” and “woven of” seem light
Person...and person what do you know of light?
     Of your meme of: tour of an ordinary wild-mind person
And person as journeyman-woman?
Is not a tree meme exactly but a state of jungle?
     Of long forest occurring over time,
Not as Cambrian but as child as contemporary person
     Blink your eye it’s archaic person as person
Is liana
Is not machete
     but ornament in complexity
Is grit of the multitudinous mental universes
as real as person’s poems?
and
Is softer person now because she imbibed her own light?

Come below borders of all you imagine
O my persons

as if you were coming up through inchoative eons to mental talk

crept across Beringia

a Person woven of psychotropic-shards, fur and bone

a Person woven of glimmer, of cure

Clicks of Xhosa

A Person woven of malachite ritual

Unearth the green, click of stone

Command passes over a Persian motif
____________________________________________________

Puntumayo the source
condor flight
long lay low longs to sink down here prowl
     mud knee high longing lope of the jaguar
if you were summoned winging
     would believe you?

if you were listening and spoken to in neutral speech
     would believe you?
who rules in the night top of the food chain
would....

would believe you?

condor holds a snake in volcanic vision statuary
     St Augustin

& the cat talks to you in her crepuscular power

how far back does a seer go
43,000 BCE?

Sea elf offers elixir for long life

Jade medicine cup sits in the museum in Ecuador 5, 000 years old

Person woven of sound bands bells rattles

Person woven of multiple mammal bands you try on, around many waists

A one of them, ominous and lumbering approaches the glint-rise of drawn-out-dawn

Another: you are a nursing mother

Red cord around your waist with knots for blood time

armed and waiting, psyche intact to be milked

Down the grind
     Elemental-metal problem don’t kill it

Person woven of vulnerability don’t kill it

So that the ecosphere takes notice
Miles underground of itself on top of you
____________________________________________________

what trying to tell us of mammal stealth
unprecedented warnings with consonants of “H” and “W”
& hissing sounds and groan heh heh heh

& I’ll say it again the suffering on this land
palpable right under you
what done to the indigenes
rip and torture of their person
& to the land
& to the science
& to the medicine
& to the children
the whole genocide
what summoning to tell you this?

brain a storehouse of gigantic suffering
go nine years into darkness


don’t like it don’t do it don’t like it don’t do it
hydraulic fracturing heh heh
Shattering under you don’t don’t do it
Person woven of performing sutras don’t don’t
The thunder said don’t do it and symmetry said heh heh

And gambols to the flight of the asteroid

A person woven of nimble words so mere fractions of them
Our phonemes of ag and ar and ra as antidote to gloom

Woven of white poppy gar ra ra tsa ma ma

whist whist whist heh heh

Of the power of the centaur’s heel woven by a poet
In the sky above you

Person woven of spheres enclosing spheres

Person woven of morse code of digitizing “distance now”

And gambols to the flight of the asteroid

Trajectory think “distance now”

And of the nimbus of a swerve
As if it could move light years
already happened      but not yet
____________________________________________________

Is anything central? Can you strive? Can you cure. Are you votive identity? The baby jaguar is blind at first. What are your roots and what are your severances and what do they constitute of imagination? do you stalk can you heal will you climb. What is the link to the link of the trance of the trace of your heat-coil. Now you are quick, soon you will be dead. Ancestor! If roots are rural and you are on the ground barefoot, or if they are urban and you bend inwardly( your concrete sepulcher) will that help with the ground turning underneath your feet in jungle metaphor? And if the scene changes and suddenly abruptly something is riven – imploding rhythm – from you – then what? A new planet? What is being relational when you hardly know the kinetics of your own chemistry. And where you are from but you know goes back, back with all the other visitors who crowd your head. What will support mind in the longest sweetest deepest quivering night you live and notate within, and how will you move to caution others: be still, be very still .... it’s dawn in the adventure, space and time.

 [NOTE. This recent excerpt from a longer piece came from notes while participating in a recent ceremony with the extraordinary Taino Indians of Colombia, an unbroken thousands of years' spiritual tradition. – A.W.]