Six poems by Alfred K. LaMotte

ELECTION

I voted.

I voted for the rainbow.

I voted for the cry of a loon.

I voted for my grandfather’s bones
that feed beetles now.

I voted for a singing brook that sparkles
under a North Dakota bean field.

I voted for salty air through which the whimbrel flies
South along the shores of two continents.

I voted for melting snow that returns to the wellspring
of darkness, where the sky is born from the earth.

I voted for daemonic mushrooms in the loam,
and the old democracy of worms.

I voted for the wordless treaty that cannot be broken
by white men or brown, because it is made of star semen,
thistle sap, hieroglyphs of the weevil in prairie oak.

I voted for the local, the small, the brim
that does not spill over, the abolition of waste,
the luxury of enough.

I voted for the commonwealth of the ancient forest,
a larva for every beak, a wing-tinted flower
for every moth’s disguise, a well-fed mammal’s corpse
for every colony of maggots.

I voted for open borders between death and birth.

SOLAR STORM

It is difficult for God
to let there be light
without your eyes.
That glory is your work.
Now get busy burning
yourself to ashes.
Didn’t you know?
Each photon of your body
is the whole sun.
On the tip of a dendrite
in this very thought,
a proton’s dark core
condenses the death
of a thousand galaxies
into amethyst wonder.
It is not enough
to illuminate your mind
with knowledge.
Your flesh must dance,
a wickless flame,
jump off cliffs
into the void,
drown with frogs
in an emerald
forest pool,
tangled in the fetid delight
of mud-sprung
water lilies.
 
You need to starve
for forty nights,
then get drunk
on a buttercup.
Life is too furious
for the merely enlightened.
A wild one needs
nakedness and victory,
a storm to ride
back into her heart-beaten
stillness.
 

VESPERS

“Our great mother does not take sides; she protects
the balance of life.” ~Neytiri, ‘Avatar’
Because I am neither
“for” nor “against,”
I have outraged everyone
but the Goddess…
She and I quietly
recline by a stream
eating whatever berries
are in season.
It’s the flow of stillness
we all know,
some of us carried
along by the current,
some of us just watching.
Please don’t call me
“irresponsible.”
I respond to mothwing,
breath of raindrop,
thistletouch of purple
evening, mourning cry
of mother raven
just as she dissolves
into a Winter mist.
If you want the “answer,”
friend, just rest
more passionately
in the darkening meadow
of this moment,
this silence
where the question
never arises.
 

WHY TARA TURNS GREEN

Some parts of your body are alive,
and some are numbed by shame.
The real purpose of meditation
is to wake up God
in your supernova toes,
arouse your bones’ erotic photons,
let each neutrino ring
like a mindfulness bell
in your rib cage,
make every proton rhythmic
with its star,
inspire a leukocyte to waltz
with a red dwarf.
This is how ancestors dance
with angels in your blood.
Have your received a morning glory’s
promiscuous smile,
a kiss from the dust on your sole?
O yogini, O devoted monk,
I know you’ve been trying to sing
without lips, “I am not this body!”
But Adam was a breath of mud.
His first wife, Lilith, liked to ride
on top, and Jesus died
on the Tree of Life shouting,
“I won’t leave anything behind!”
He claimed each sparkle
of your semen and each tear
you mingle with marrow and loam.
The half-chewed morsel
of bagel in your mouth
is the kingdom of his perfect joy.
Don’t you know he has a secret name
that means, “Miracle of Worms”?
The Bodhi Tree is the Body Tree.
That’s why Tara turns green
when her fingers stroke the ground.
It’s why we share food,
pray for sacred land and water,
laugh when we see babies,
whirl and spin like wizened leaves
at sunset when we die.

WHAT MATTERS

All that matters is the kiss
of pistil and stamen.
All that matters is the wave nature of the moon.
All that matters is the sexual caress
of listener and silence, thrill
in stillness where the music is conceived.
All that matters is the death of distances,
the sapphire yearning-pool
where the sky in your forehead drowns
my darkest embryo again and again.
Are we not born inside each
other as tears?
Here is the gift of emptiness.
All that matters is the touch
of your breath – pouring in
from its desert night across the sea
where stars arrange themselves tenderly
over your slumber –
and my breath
ebbing into the diamond blackness
that is always awake.
 

INSTRUCTIONS FOR A POETRYOGA PLAYSHOP

1. Standing Micro-movements

Abandon every program and routine.
There is no sequence of postures.
Stand valiantly and gently sway
in the breeze of your own breath.
Let your body rise and fall,
circling silently, a starry firmament
between your nipples,
boundless space between
the ligaments of each bone,
muscles washed in pure attention
moving from their ocean wheels,
each galactic cell of human flesh
a Wordless creation
of the infinitesimal…
There are no instructions.
There is no book.
Move more slowly, going nowhere.
Micro-movements
inventing themselves
from molten golden stillness.
Now it is you own dance…
 

2. Sitting Meditation
(Micro-movement of Shakti in the Spine)

From the baby’s soft spot in your crown
to your sap-dripping sacrum
runs a nerve down whose core
the liquid lightning bolt hums.

Bees feast here, making
honey of your sorrow…
Let blue fire incinerate your mind.
How could a single thought arise
in spaceless bewilderment?

Kali will guide you.
Reason is not required.
Your backbone is her wand.
The creatures around you are sparks
thrown out of that burning neuron,
the axis of your soul.

They are all inside you, the song
of the wood thrush, tangle
of devil’s claw, sunbeams
frozen at this end
into mountain tops,
vagabond comets, crazy angels
gazing over the rim
of entropy toward a horizon
of derelict light,
curved into this dewdrop
on a blade of alfalfa…
 
 
Words like “You” and “I ”
have been scorched into silence
by the Lord of Wonder,
whom we no longer call “Annihilation”
but “Master of the Dance.”

Shivo’ham, Shivo’ham!
All that remains is a swirl of cinders.
Grasping the enormity of the disaster,
we know that we cannot control
the laughter that creates the world.