Stephen Collis

Late Thoughts on the Biotariat

 

I walk with my brother
amongst oak trees
whose fluidity we consider

Stop at a sequoia
he’s become friendly with
look up expanse of trunk

As if looking up
a mathematical solution
or is it a problem?

The measure and
the measuring
of everything going on

At what point
can we mark
the moment a life
/ or a civilization /
peaks
begins its descent?

This question posed
4:30 PM when he
is 67 and I 53
a pebble beach in Victoria
the sea and land have been
collaborating on for a while

What
thrill racket
breaks over us?

What animate
realms of seabirds
thinking people?

What names can we
give to what
we will never know?

I want to say
biotariat
say the clouds

Or more accurately
the hydrological cycle
every infinitesimal bit
of coding that makes a tree

And my dearest desperate
friends all over the world
tripping over borders
and these unidentified
song birds around us
in the shrubs
and the shrubs too
are the class I belong to

You say
Mercury in retrograde
or more accurately

I love all this
slow groping
in the dark
after what we
never will see
in bright of day

The known universe
might now be
5% of the
universe so
plant your theory
on that solid ground
watch it slide from
under tomorrow

What time is it?
I keep asking
in the time that
time did not exist

Which is eternal
or maybe ubiquitous
which is time spatialized
Sweet ubiquity
mon amore
the true shade of
all tomorrow’s parties

That we did not vote for
knowing it was up to
the all of us
we might compose

Kelp we might be
carotid artery
contractual obligation
unsigned but written
into our symbiotic ontology

So it might be
we’re cresting a hill
in our conversation

Saying passenger pigeon
saying Rabb’s tree frog
saying indigenous grassland

And right there
topping the rise
admiring the view a second

And spotting the biotariat
to which we
always belonged

Red in tooth and claw
and ready to fight
back to back
alongside the last
of our microorganisms

We begin to fall
away from first
and best thought
of planet’s own mind

Falling through the
beauty and the horror
of swift-footed extinction

Our rebellion the
true ubiquity of
another universe
blinking at dawn