Duiker Doings

Today, we were given a great gift:
an old story about greed and famine
and the fate of a forest duiker,
one-time friend of the Batwa pygmy.

Outside the small king’s house,
where he showed us some herbs
his people have healed with from before
history was something we wrote down;
when it was narrated in the long night
by old woman, like the one doubled down
before us, performing perfectly her play
between ancestors and talking antelope,
using tangents as another way to show
all that must be left unsaid here,
outside the trees that, too, once talked.

To one side of the modest mud palace,
made with his own hands,
that healer-king grows a special bush:
Mimosa pudica, the touch-me-not tree,
which also appeared today in a book
about time and memory and mind
and the movement of plants,
as if to prove that consciousness is more
like a river spread across space
such that it cannot be damned;
only slightly redirected, retranscribed
by tampering poets and their marginalia
like magic leaves mad for the slightest touch,
springing together in strange plant tales
that leave no room to doubt the way it connects:

old stories of small forest spirits
and plant electricity and how all of time
can be traversed in the movement
of just one stem.

Traces

The River of Consciousness

Never stops

Because stories > language