The Natural Order of Things
March 11 2017


The way water seeks its level,
falling, if it could
to the lowest point on earth.
Where it rests,
a warm stagnant pool
that concentrates, in the darkness and depth,
thick as brine
depleted of air. 

Or follow a tree, as it radiates out.
Dividing 
from trunk, to branch, to twig;
a green crown
trembling in the wind, 
a vast network of roots
spreading, thinning. 

The river
to its delta, swamp, bog.
The carotid, branching off
smaller and smaller,
until its only blood
is a solitary cell.
A single red corpuscle,
bled of oxygen
in its pale dimpled skin,
lodged 
at the clotted end
of a tiny terminal vessel.

In a city of millions
in a nondescript block 
in a modest apartment
all talking at once,
a dining room table
containing all the people you love.
Faces flushed,
in the warm glow 
of artificial light.

As if you were the growing point
at the tip of the highest branch.
As if all of your ancestors
stood at your back,
fanning out 
like terracotta soldiers
raised from the dead.

How many divisions
until we come to rest?
In a universe, too vast to comprehend,
the small, and the settled
that let us make sense.



Nature repeats. When you step back, or zoom in closer,  the same pattern reveals itself: a river dividing, a tree branching, the pattern of vessels on a leaf. The circulatory system, as well. 

Just as we are constituent parts of something larger, in our society and communities:  each stop of the aperture, narrowing down, until the camera focuses in  on our small quotidian lives; until all the bustle and noise and chaos of the world is distilled down to a warm intimate space. We can happiliy exist in this universe, bertween these 4 familiar walls, oblivious to the whole. 

The poem is unsure what this means. Is it a growing point? Is it slow death by suffocation? 

I was watching HBO's High Maintenance, which is a series of short stories linked by an itinerant pot dealer (who actually ends up being quite peripheral in each of these self-contained narratives). The tone of each piece is to begin in the chaos of New York City -- claustrophobic quick-cut views and sounds of the variety and bigness of this vast metropolis -- then narrow in on a very small space containing that story's circumscribed lives. Who, for that half hour, become the whole world for us; and so reduce this incomprehensible and intimidating place to a human and livable scale. Which is how we perceive our own lives:  the centre of the universe; except when we briefly surface and realize we are insignificant characters, spun off into some marginal and minor extremity.  

(Of course, every story does this:  zeroing in on someone. But I think the power of High Maintenance is how the main character is introduced. Because at first you're not at all sure who the story is going to follow, and it's only when things are well along that one of many walk-ons and extras steps up, and the central character actually emerges.)