This week I signed a contract with Palimpsest Press to publish Horsetail Rhizome, a book of nonfiction that began, much of it, with this blog. You will also find there dreams, poems, epigrams, reviews, mildly dirty jokes & much unclassifiable. ¶ Here, for your perhaps muted pleasure, is the first entry.
In high school I was called by one boy, he’s a family doctor now, and also, thanks to a low charisma you often see in autocrats in the news, by many others there, Horse. I don’t know why. I don’t have a snout. My nose extends about as far as yours. Something about my jaw? Dentists pulling my teeth, and they pulled a lot, said I had deeper roots than they’d seen before. Horse. Haven’t thought about it in years until just now. I do hate seeing myself from outside as others might – in profile, in a shop window, on a Zoom call – and can’t abide sitting in a restaurant where one wall is mirrors, facing the mirrors. My hope of being gently with others, notwithstanding a firestorm in me I can quiet but not extinguish, comes in part from that sad conflicted boy & I thank him for it. ¶ As to the horsetails, they broke through every quarter of the painstook landscape I made of native plants on the patch of ground where a lot of what’s here was written. I hated them, couldn’t destroy them, so they became teachers, too. They’ve longer roots than can be believed. Spread underground in oxygen-poor soil & any work to kill them makes them stronger. The Greek myth of the Hydra must begin with them – cut one stalk & two three four grow from the neck stump – brutal generative power of the earth in one of its green forms. Has no flower, predates dinosaurs, scours pewter, treats UTIs. ¶ When I dig down deep enough I connect with an occult network of pulpy tubular tissue going no direction in particular. One comes up through a crack in my garage floor white & blind like a cave fish. My first title for the shambolic omnibus, the unholy hybrid of myth & reason, accident & dream, now in your hands was Nothing New. I had thought to set that phrase in equable counterpoint with Ezra Pound’s insistence, first & last to himself, to “day by day / make it new.” Then this other scheme broke through some crack in my mind that thought made.
Horsetail Rhizome, the first of two volumes, begins in the Upper Paleolithic & runs to around 1900. Its companion, Occam’s Aftershave, will pick up where Horsetail leaves off & reach to the Singularity & beyond.
The image up top? My backyard in Bellingham WA where I lived once. All native species, including the deer. Apparently once in my time there I managed to pull all the horsetails? I find it hard to believe.
The Art of Compost 