Lines

Walking, weaving,gesticulating,singing,storytelling

my lines through spacetime,sometimes losing

my thread, I spider dissolving traces in the blue,

everything is moving,the dots get joined up,

this calligraphy of breath is all I know,

drawing,writing,groping with my fingers

ahead or round,not always sure which direction,

but somehow I am altering the world.

Pathfinder,work your way forward,smell out the prey,

notating the music any way you can,

flesh has its martyrdoms but the voice,

cannot, for all its sins, be nailed down.

The air’s amanuensis,I finger this flute

to variable effect,improvising all that is,

Amazonian tribesman of the suburbs,

embroidering textiles with waves,

painting skin and pots with oracular signs.

The line is my flint, my cutting chipping tool.

I must keep on making these quipus,

tying knots in memory,treading step by step

through the grass,across the fields

my forefathers walked before me.

Cracks in breaking ice,dead wood,dried mud,

creases in my palms,wrinkles round my eyes,

all the streaks,stripes and flows in nature,

acupunctural meridians of the body,

I stitch into the lacework, the fishing net.

In the square in Luoyang,each day at dusk,

people come with paintbrushes and water

and write huge characters on the pavement

watching them evaporate almost instantly,

their minds and bodies relaxed,serene,

containing all the rhythms in the world.

A Chukchi shaman sketches a map

of the paths in the underworld,

potholes and tunnels wandered by the dead.

Cleave to the contours and feel the spaces

married to the edges,proof against demons,

be it Celtic knotwork, or Tamil kolam,

Abelam designs from strips,strings and fronds,

Navajo blankets woven mathematically.

These lines we inscribe on the skin,

Footprints of a mysterious new bird.

Solemnly a New Guinean chief fingers

the knotted crocodile cord,reliving

his tribe’s primeval migration,like a ghost

wayfaring vigilantly to the other world.

An Aborigine elder draws with his finger

in the sand, tracing the lines and vortices

of Dreamtime journeys his forbears made.

And on a Micronesian beach a seafarer

Lays out coconut-leaf ribs to illustrate

the ocean swells and currents to his apprentice.