train whistles love stories & tallgrass prairies |
Issue 6
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& red deer
rabbits boars & wild cattle & predators: spotted hyenas leopards lynxes & wolves brown bears & wildcats even lions & people plodding southward away from the ice sheets to the shelter of warm estuarine grasslands – limpid & corvid – of oceanic plenty in sight of Africa & to the question of early human extinction some forty thousand years ago: in forty-seven human teeth: incisors canines bicuspids & molars doubling back that date extracted from Daoxian’s Fuyan Cave lies rebuttal & restoration of Homo neanderthalensis & the myth of brutish of biologically base yet masters of harsh lands & freezing cold through a hundred thousand years of pitiless winter moving south & still further & finally – science suggests – to the south coast of Spain for survival & succumbing to extinction after millennia of isolation & inbreeding & indeed in the end yielding only to disease & as I write train whistles blow & blow & blowing sounds incessantly across once unplowed prairies * I hear thunder way over to the west * & I imagine domination or ascendency – one species perhaps by far the physical or material superior the other systematically thinking through every option – until immunity or a carrier of lethal infection or both become the arbiters still back at the cave one reaches out – shell beads strung on sinew swinging softy against bare skin – to the other * adornment ardor desire * & holding tight to one another’s hands they climb/ clambering back back into blackness – & I think there has to be darkness for incandescence – * one carries the torch * * one bears sharp chipped flints * I picture them in that stone sanctum laid out on that dolomite ledge used for sleeping breeding carving crosshatched lines overlapping intersecting/ integrating in a single engraved device an emblem their love token * the three of us alike in affection & longing dread & desire * * three of us/ Homo genus * & here in my portable house in my 16-foot tiny trailer in a campground on the Tallgrass I live & sleep & eat thinking about the first people ever to arrive here their presence palpable on these Great Plains here hewn in Smoky Hills sandstone dressed glimmering in desert varnish their avowals eroding away day-by-day to soft clay & I’m thinking of my first love & estrangement & why I left/ I kissed him goodbye at my doorstep our eyes wet/ glistening & then I closed the door & I picture two lovers etched * deep deeper * in rocky tryst – both right-handed by the position & sequence of the strokes/ up to sixty or perhaps in pictures from another day in a cave that never achieves complete darkness call it Spirit Eye or Bird-in-a-Rock – in pigments blown through hollow bone in flashes of light/ entopic images * people & horses birds & bison * or instead in some other epoch long gone/ gutted dried & distent – can you imagine two sweethearts’ outstretched arms completely transmuted as wings of targeted raptors? – in dark-feathered carrion capes in some Middle Paleolithic cosmological dance of tribute still somewhere in the realm of the anatomical lies behavioral modernity that is the ability to devise & make sense of symbols * for love for hate for loneliness & death * & I’m thinking about charcoal & skullcaps/ stone tools & burnt seeds/ remnants as archaeological memory ensepulchered in the stratigraphy & another human species’ existence two hundred thousand years longer than ours – despite glaciation interbreeding & epidemics – than modern humans with our two-plus percent Neanderthal genes & I think here we all are now & I wonder whether it really matters in the end who came first/ who later & who last |
MARA ADAMITZ SCRUPE is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer. She has authored seven award-winning poetry collections, her work has been published in international literary journals, and she has won or been shortlisted for numerous visual art and literary prizes, fellowships, and awards.
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