A line
like the seam along the body of a plastic doll
divides me into hemispheres
A left
and a right
Nose, cleft, lips and chin
I am a mathematician
a Gardner of clouds
making shapes
from eternal things
and witnessing through electric appendages
It’s all the flavor
of treble and the size of white noise
bleeding out across the horizon
The wrinkles in the planet’s surface
tides like the tiny crests
on the crust of a cabbage
Microbial worlds of sentience
silent in the ephemera
between here
and my fingertips
I stand divided
Between the world
And what I call it
I straddle
one foot on the ground
and the other not a foot at all
Calling out across a continent
a voice traversing countless miles of
air
arriving some semblance of itself
New and tired;
a mother tending
to her duties
How can body ever speak
to its inhabitants,
its incarnation,
the meat
to look upon its own guest
and say
You are divided
You are silent
Your voice reverberates past the clouds
through the mitochondria
past nebulas and dendrils
and into warm hands
kneading cool earth
Pushing seeds across the seam,
continuing this strange conversation
spoken in code
The roots reach deep like synapses
or the tendrils of a river
down through the soil
seeking neighbors to embrace
Dividing in two
Spreading identity through mimesis
I look into the mirror
and see the place where
my hemispheres join
I feel my skin
which keeps me encased,
let’s me know the differences
between hot and cold,
inside and out,
even right and wrong, eventually
Skin is
the original
difference
The story was infinite
Disembodied, impersonal
Not a story at all
as it rained down from some celestial rock
prokaryotic and discrete
No sense of self
distracting from the infinite pool
The moment when the avalanche is over you,
the tsunami cresting
lightning lifting from the static beneath your feet,
the sublimity of consciousness slipping away in old age, even the face of your child unfamiliar
The seam is where it comes together,
where it breaks apart,
where the inanimate becomes conscious,
where morals meet violence,
where gender fails to describe,
and where the light, however dim
Breaks through and powers each word, each seed, each conscious moment
towards its empty palace