Poem to accompany craft interview of Gene Fowler. The single poem will take three to four print pages (depending on page & type sizes). This poem throws the reader immediately into the "daydreaming place" in which to walk.... It is part of a three poem sequence (hidden) in FIRES. The note at the end is essential and is tied in with the reconceived intro.

COSMIC LANGUAGE

Walking.
Lifting a foot and falling
forward, eye
hovering and darting.
A good swinging walk.
Prowling outward, birthing change,
climbing over
the long curve of the globe, while flesh
lets go,
skin sags over into pockets,
eyes swim.
Blue green flashes hover and dart
                                    over shadowed bronzing
of copper's orange glare,
dragonflies
flagging the far inward curve of world.
Restless breezes touch my nostrils,
                                       iced sea winds raging
outward,
curving in the far mist
and raging again
inward
and through me.

Cities fall away
and rain forests, deserts, mountains,
coiled and holding rivers, after looming over me,
and dried out, half caved away footprints,
from which grasses spring back,
and the grasses,
ship grooves and the waters
rushing back into them.
It all falls away,
falls out into distance
and curves
inward,
rushing through me.
All my walkings.

An opening night-journey through San Francisco,
cavorting
in and out of the personae
of my predecessors
                    tickling infant lines
into mime.

A closing one in Berkeley,
hunger gnawing reflections out of concrete.
Corpse rolling
through the rhythms, turning
on its spit.
Again and again.
Walking.
Nothing so simple as a city.
Or rain forest. Or desert. Or mountains.
Walking, now, with eyes open
to themselves.
Where do i put my foot?
Nothing there til it's placed.
The power . Never thought upon.
Used easily, when used, by all of us.
Doing it consciously? Hideous.
How many times to fall and get up and fall?

Amid fallen leaves
                           piled against the curb,
a stone
sparkling brightly with a quiver
of beginning life.
                                An unseen thing.
Called upon to summon it
school children twist in tortuous
agonies of mumbling
praxis.
Lapis philosophorum.
Black marks on the white sheet.
Nothing there but marks, tracks of articulating
bird-foot.
No meaning. No message.
Til the outpouring of an eye.
In that outpouring, the secret of our power.

The stone
cast out, to fall and roll in the leaves,
to blood leaves' edges,
to leap
and become light.
                              Network of light leapings.
We cast a net
outward in a great swirling disc of flight,
cosmic fishermen,
and haul in our load of order.
But our power ? The order we net is our own,
sent out
and hauled back.
Nothing seen that the eye didn't make.

Walking.
Seeing nothing but what i dream,
touching nothing not of my invention,
smelling only
stray odors of my own passing,
hearing musics rising from my own sources, my muses.
Nothing.
No thing that isn't a man,
isn't me.

"Don't read things into what's there!"
There's nothing there, no there, but for my reading.
And how much dare i read?
What the Hell, why not
all of it?
And reading, i'm
walking.

coda:     A sea
            washes around my feet, echoed
            in currents of running sand, and
            half sunk, embedded in green-grey mush
            the half-rotted skull
            of some prehistoric man, some pre-man
            or ur man,
            ants, who once dreamed of flesh-bits,
            petrified juttings of the bone.
            a recognition.
            How achingly long, this walk.
            The waters tugging at ankle hairs.
            The sands skillfully slipping out
            from underfoot.
            There's nothing there, no there, but
            for my reading.
            Lifting a foot and falling...

Note follows poem immediately...

Cosmic Language is the third of three "walking" poems : San Francisco Poem, an all night walk through the city and, in my early days as a poet, a poet's "subjective" world. Obsidian, another "all nighter" in Berkeley and, maybe, a walk through the shadow of the valley of death--but the sun comes.... And Cosmic Language. In this poem, I'm walking "where poems are birthed": http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/fires.htm#books takes you to a digitized Fires containing the three poems.