The aspens at the cross-roads talk together
with their dark wet gold out,
bartering with the wind
over the pond’s reflective mirror — bruised
azure acrylic, butterscotch glass, anyone’s flesh-tone, chrome.

Listen You.

Who disappeared into those shadows?
Joined at the spine with death and life?
Unravelling like smooth threads?
Listen to the rhythmic thumping inside water,
like black birds pushing against the glass
to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
words frothing out merciless and angry:

You can’t abandon your history
and it won’t abandon you.

Down over the rocks, an explosion, a discovery
of the torched & reckless hour
in this carved gold of shifting faces:
tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves and a scorched coil of greasy hemp,
scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the lingering smell
of gasoline,
thick glass blood cells, a throat slit pouring silk
whirled in the ochre light —
the light of truth.
His head is a rose being burned alive.

How the soul feels like a dried sheaf,
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
and the small wings
unfold from the fabric of night,
bound up at length for harvesting,
darkness after it, dark riddled through it.

Manna does not fall.
Saviors do not save.
The earth drinks men and their loves
like wine.

Souls which are planted . . . continue growing . . . until generations
will tell tales of having met someone who knew.

The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves,
and all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth —
it’s breaking apart, it’s turning over, it’s pushing up.

Listen You, if no one else,
Can you feel the ground rumble under your feet?
Back through the brindled understory
etched in wood…
You can’t abandon your history
and it won’t abandon you.

SOURCES: The Brindled Understory Cento is comprised entirely of lines borrowed from the following poets (in order of appearance): Edward Thomas; Roger Reeves; Lynda Hull; Jill McDonough; Tino Villanueva; Adrienne Rich; Sonia Sanchez; Anne Sexton; Brian-Komei-Dempster; Lucille Clifton; Margaret Walker; David Bottoms; Jake Adam York; Mary Oliver; Lynda Hull; Sonia Sanchez; Richard Wright; Robin Glow; Jane Kenyon; Nikki Giovanni; Roger Reeves; Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Mary Oliver; Jake Adam York; Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Daisy Fried; Lenelle Moise; Yehuda Amichai; Nikki Giovanni; Sylvia Plath; Philip Levine; Anne Waldman; Tino Villanueva; Anne Waldman; Donovan Kuhio Colleps; Laura Da’; Jake Adam York