The Run

 

Stories unfold

Their myriad hues

captured in so many brush strokes

gifting us

with impressions,

leaving imprints of the body’s rhythmic flow

hidden beneath the woodland's litter.

Ever implacable, too,

            the im-possible

                     nudging the imagination:

                                  unyielding,

                                           without hubris

                                                    firing the ego

                                                            with its oxygen

                                                                        of new possibilities!

Tree roots,

            gritstones,

                        broken sticks,

                                                 bracken

                                                            countless imprints of shoes

                                                                                    without names    

                  

signpost what has become named ways,

in a special desert 

for the historical imagination.

Footpaths mapped,

their coding,

in being cultivated in our sciences,

ever in danger of losing sight

of the impossible

at play in our world.

 

Colours shock

Greys, blacks, browns, rusty reds,

impressionist strokes of light

adding greens, ochres, yellows and splashes of white and blue here and there,

in their play,

revealed at last,

as nature’s ever-moving canvass.

The marks on the path:

footprints, broken branches, trampled brambles,

squashed grasses,

lichens and mosses; some having lost their colour.

They speak of many bodies.

The same story

played out,

almost every day.

Others, the Other,

ever intent, it would seem,

upon opening us to different ways,

despite our obvious incapacity

to listen.

The ever-present

hubristic iterations of human powers,

filling 'us',

the collective 'one',

with evermore certainty,

and this alarming incapacity

to listen to the earth,

as one would a member of the family,

while the body continues

to stain and to scour

this pathway, 

along with a sublime array of other pathways,

in 'our' world, 

our societies.

No mention here of earth-world,

earth-society.

The Other being

not any one person,

but an object of thought. 

An idea.

A violent and nameless ‘it’.

Its’ photograph,

in its imaging,

in creating its own illusion,

fueling every possible act

of possession

– “my, your, their… path”

on this stage we call “life.”

Its’ very grammar,

the grammar of the spectacle,

ceaseless in the business of detaching

us/them

further from such everyday wilful acts,

really doesn’t have the capacity

within this world,  

really doesn’t possess us with desire,

within our world,

to look back

at our-without-exclusion-relationship with the earth.

 

Colours astonish.

Foliage, its green hues

still flourishing

here and there

feeding on air’s carbon

gifting the body

with its cellular fire

from the oxygen of life.

Briars and branches,

their many leaves creating their own book we call the canopy,

nourished

by earth’s red-brown muds.

With black peats

oozing

            dribbling

                        leaching

                                    exuding

autumn’s showers.

Without a word

myriad

intimate

silent actions

in many of the capillaries

of the body

making fast

the impossible 

connection

between the earth and the world.

The impossible:

that infidel

always

already at work,

in cutting through

the fidelity of any narrative

ironically makes such a possibility.

In nourishing

our many stories

it asks nothing

about their im-possible values,

about their costing 

nothing less than the earth. 

 

Sure feet

Ever on the move

upon this earth,

urging the body onwards,

hands flow

over the warm flesh

of a belly

touching the body

of an imagined lover.

Body, yes body,

as that great body of the earth

ever in play

in the play

of the impossible,

leaving its marks

of what’s possible

on every street corner.

Drawing in more air

legs speed over easier ground.

Light plays in the trees,

shadows dance

against the backdrop

of the autumn mists.

Earth falls away on one side.

Rises on the other.

Reaching steep ground again

body in rhythm with the earth

upwards

            upwards

                        upwards

fingers barely touching

the living flesh

would appear to have sent

their own electric charge

through almost every Erotic centre

in the body.

Hot and aching,

            filled with the nectar

                          of its own juices,

                                       expectant and erect,

                                                    the body pulsing in its longing,

                                                               in the flow

                                                                             of the event:  

An unfolding flow of ek-stasis

beyond any measure.

The im-possible

at once lifting the body,

making its own time,

creating a space beyond calculation,

beyond measure by any chronometers,

so, transcending

the event,

exceeding any quite im-possible outcome.

This beautifully silent engine room,

of the im-possible,

opening space for the body

in this, our society of the spectacle,

consuming it

with an almost insatiable desire

for possibilities,

while its languages remaining ever in danger 

of excluding earth

from its conversation,

the body rarely glimpses the im-possible's

sublime seduction,

hidden beneath the fallen leaves

of our everyday calculus.

Kevin Flint, October 2017

I hope you enjoy reading this poem. I look forward to hearing any thoughts, suggestions, feelings... that emerge from your reading.