by
Laurie Anne Whitt*
| AN AMPHIBIAN |
|
double-lived intermediary |
| never wholly one, and not |
| entirely the other, it is |
| what remains in the space |
| between gill & lung, fish |
| & reptile: a dual-habited |
| evolutionary gamble still |
| unfolding in the boundary |
| world, where two elements |
| touch, alter one another. |
| SCREE |
| i. |
| I have seen it happen, unexpectedly |
| a deep rumble & the side of a mountain gives way, |
| burying everything below in scree |
| a jumbled spill of jagged rock. |
| Millenia of weathering may be needed |
| before a mountainside comes to this, talus |
| loose fragments, a nearly impassable rubble |
| that may still be part of the mountain, or not. |
| ii. |
| It happens too in poetry: without warning, words |
| dislodge from the world |
| when they amass more swiftly than forces of erosion can remove them |
| and course down; |
| they tumble to the poet in a heap |
| coming to rest on the white-sloped page |
| where the process of weathering is displaced |
| by crafting, as the poet works away |
| a perilous, precarious going. |
| Millenia may pass |
| before the world & the poet come to this |
| a steep slide of words, shards of language |
| poems partly about the world, and partly not. |
| BOUNDARY FORMS |
| Stretching like sinews holding muscle to bone, they draw bodies together. |
| BELONGING/BETWEEN |
|
Exceptions to the taxonomic system threaten our basic model for order, signify intrusion. Ambiguity sets off an anxious reaction. - Paul Shephard |
| They are the breach and what heals the breach; |
| creatures of hyphenation |
| whose cleft bodies move like patient leviathans |
| past deep rifts in consciousness, beyond riven understanding |
| into the great zones of separation |
| dubious interspaces |
| where danger lies in fissures and fusions |
| that come too early, or end too late. |
| * |
| Hybrids, mongrels, mixed- bloods and half-breeds |
| learn to fill the cracks they slip between; |
| the lessons of marginality. |
| They pass through borders undetected |
| smuggling mediated states of being, |
| lives split by lines that are as real as artificial. |
| Poised between realms, between dividers & their divisions |
| for them there is one way of belonging, |
| it is on the other side |
| SURROUNDING STORIES |
| i. | They are told in metes & bounds, in seasons of darkness |
| where fear and hunger are strong. |
| Boundaries come into being through them |
| spilling onto lands & lives, splitting them: |
| edges appear where there were none |
| & gather into circles, trying to make themselves |
| whole, to become one; |
| a ceaseless task since they sever everything |
| & some must lie without when others lie within. |
| Borders are lines where something else begins. |
| ii. |
| Surrounding stories are vital & necessary but false & incomplete. |
| Powerful creatures, creators of definition |
| they mark conceptual & territorial domains. |
| With each telling they gain strength |
| & circumscribe more fully, drawing those like 'us' close away from those like 'them'. |
| Borders are lines where something else begins. |
| iii. |
| But in the spaces between ambiguities surface; |
| stories run aground |
| become rimmed by marginalia, |
| part of yet apart from them. |
| In the borderlands are beings |
| which hold other stories together |
| mining & undermining them. |
| Borders are lines where something else begins. |
*
Laurie Anne Whitt
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Michigan Technological University
lawhitt@mtu.edu