Conjunctions:64 Natural Causes

Four Poems
Leech Country

As within the raucous meditations of high priests you find yourself moving and trepidatious and in the far black moving black trees. For once when I say you I mean you, the morphology pristine. You may not think there is anything particular to you but you may also not think. Somehow volume is more believable when the leech makes love to you when you deplete. Many days go by undoing the central leitmotifs of your life. You have no nature, only wilderness. This is what it is like may not be said. This is what it is not like neither. You take your apophasis and your deliquescence and when it rains like this you have felt everything. Petrichor, petrichor, you call, wishing for a way to always be seed. 


 



Five Acres

The top of this hill is called a viewpoint but is not figurative. We’ve made a philology of it which is immaculate which is as we now are, figural. Lemongrass on the slopes grows wild wind through it. The trellises are in place, the fences called eyes. There are rivers in the distance that milk. And we graze and check the motorcycle as it stays upon the slope. And we grow wild on the point through the downward sloping lemongrass and the notional. There are moments in which the condition of the mind approaches the condition of the body which we call ecstasy which now occur. 


 



Strangler Fig

Somewhere deep darkness is parapet to acts of survival. The strangler prospers in this heat multiplying its arms. As one who does not who listens who analogizes who is the analyst of events so quickly occurring as to be historical what is left save to be consumptive. It is rich and my prolific hands alert. There would be berries, there would be wood. Finite oneiric reflections by the water by the trees straining light. I agree on the premises
of the rainforest. I agree on the appropriate sounds asphyxiating. Somewhere deep language sexualizes its horror over how it may be infiltrated is body where speech is movement and all you can do is move. Somewhere deep
giddiness is lux and air which I need air and light like poverty disappear. And the choker like an aroma surrounds like ornament sits. And to be giddy you must have eaten you must have breathed. There are berries and there is wood. No passive recipients in a peaceful and -phagous world. 


 



Ballet

Though I live in a mountain I hear the sun
             outrage the skin
of a desert, it become a blister. But
             the mountain
is what I understand as one understands focus
             and monument. The nature
of dance, its arms and legs. The monument
             of the body and gravity
in relation to what departs from the pit 
             of self. How far
I stretch. What is the end of time, is it
             the peak of a mountain? Is it
the way a tree stops upon its leaves? Is it
             the concentric mind 
of a tree, the rings and rings of a tree
that forever one escapes or falls into
and survives? 
                     If the dead center of a tree is not its mind
                     but the moment about which its thinking devolves, 
                     then fallen am I
                     into orbit— 
                                        I am time as much as sand and water. I travel 
                                        along a landscape of laceration. Someone measures me
                                        and cannot entirely. A vastness
                                        like the opening out of a molecule. (The rain
above a desert will not rain because being a question it cannot answer.) Who am I
is the question asked in the mirror. This is not answerable, so I kiss the desert
and come back a blister. The desert is all about me. It inherits me. I have come
along with the nature of Everything. How fast I go
when I eliminate the sandstorm.

Aditi Machado is from Bangalore, India. She is the poetry editor at Asymptote, a journal of translation.