Do you Hesitate at the surface?
Do your eyes squint straining to see as you peer into the murky lake,
Nose just a tree leaf and skipping stone away from a sudden pludge?
It cannot see you, opaque like dust clouds, you do not exist
Are you the burrowed snake long and thick now prickled with chilled sharp leaves over your hardened belly, wet as the mud and coarse like the trunk?
Slithered into the watery abyss now moving like skin
Below in the belly all life has birthed in it,
Above, still, is the surface
Quiet on the skin, gaze uncertain, but just as thin.
Are you the gelatinous frog, realizing your prescence after dusk before dawn
Sretching yourself far and Swallowing whole to survive?
Are you the Owls in the trees screeching incendiary songs where the moon stretches thin melted beams just out of reach
Fragments of reflections,
Flipping and twisting your neck
like this, natural movements.
Who are you and so, Who are you?
Where does your voice begin?
Where does your voice stretch to?
Extended palms now stretched too
Red is the blood that pools to your chest
Fast, rapid, tremoring breath
Cycling and cycling from the back of the head to the front of the breasts.
Feed the body, then let it rest.
Birth to trepidatious chaos,
Balanced at the tip of a branch.
This fluttering leaf stemmed from the tree the wind beats down heavy, still the leaf resists uncertain of and wary of the very disconnect.
Am I the tree or the leaf?
Am I the ripple at peace, ebbed out of existence?
Am I the belly of the gator filled with live prey to digest?
Scaled and certain on the surface, That same unrelenting grip.
My nose still falters at the water.
My questions still exist.
My body has bones that I feel poking out from my knees and from my wrists.
Shaking to hold me steady and still,
Ankles are tender, swollen and scratched
Pathways have been paved on my skin like an oral map...
My body speaks without a mouth.
My body speaks without a mouth.
My body sees without its eyes
My body sees without its eyes
My body tastes without its throat
My body sings from bleats to croaks
My body moves without its body
My body lives inside the sky
My body lies beneath the water
My body is the outspoken cry
Of lakes and of forests and century-old beasts
Dense and dark on the floor I still creep.
Though wary and uncertain and strained it may be,
I belong to the land and the land is wholly me.