To lovers who canoe the day
I keep coming back to that image floating downriver alongside seeds Seeds that sleeping with the American future/ the age to come/ new something How we stand between us to disappear the plants we seem lost to evolutions airy need to be just in case Engineering nomenclature would probably disagree is war against wildness We judge wickedness judgment does bespeak feeling the necessity of sweetest wilderness to value multiplicity Lost in destinies our centuries’ rivers long for natural history’s twin den We’d be wise to save gems the implantable useless miraculous new code/ seed I plan once to swallow to shrink life look— how fiercely one for many the new leaf marks
Grafters grift monocultural lists of genetic engineers They do it to shrink evolutions possibilities say, future open assembly of life quintillions of us biodiversity teeming Zoology storms genes The world created us holds steady risks this multiplicity Risks and stringing along not with words though good god the crazy archive that summer afternoon the Ohio in view our planet in nature eccentric by day conveyed the way we ripped up the way we woke the canoe to hang our weight in seeds we balanced laughing in naval architecture each helping keep each other on the river where the metaphor imagines a different story for lovers of nature/ the distance/ the crew we might see again what they are supine in unassailed by always together
In our dream band, on the xylophone:
Valyntina is a multi-genre artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart (Cathexis Northwest Press 2020) and In Our Now (Finishing Line Press 2022). You’ll find her work in Impermanent Earth, The Journal, Lana Turner, The Night Heron Barks and Sunspot. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.
Ran Off With the Star Bassoon 