Les os du lac
---
Where we are from, we do not have very many walls.
So we had to think carefully about what it means to put darkness inside a room and forest space.
And then poke and scratch wounds in that darkness.
La Sha Made mauves.
People who did this were not building anything.
They were inviting.
And made spaces so quiet, so dark that light would feel comfortable.
Free Da.
We think this is polite.
This is how to ask a question without making demands.
Our world sometimes entered upside down.
Maybe this spiritual light has always been waiting for someone to make a room humble enough for unsheltered families.
Bisso Lair.
---
Eleven hours before.
Waiting.
Bower Brrd in another country is pressing its beak against a frozen knob because it saw that squirrel saliva crystallizes differently on hackberry tree bark than it does on shiny brass or marine iron.
Bower Brrd's voice makes a gentle weather system.
Collecting twigs nothing asked for.
A model ship is colonial still in a quiet, blue-stained glass bottle that has never contained a person.
We forgot this phrase.
Between the Cage Wires.
The phrase for when we make ourselves smaller in a wild life prison cell so that a guard will come closer.
---
Careless Passion.
Hold still because a snow owl has landed near and you do not want to be the reason it flies away forever.
Drink up pirate.
Stand up straight all day.
Treasures you can steal and you do with all of your musket gunpowder might.
The humid potential you will lose when all hands on deck becomes stones retaining water differently than wood.
Affecting how light behaves on landscapes.
Over a garden.
Between houses.
After burying something.
Promises we will make but not follow through with.
---
On the sands of that first dark place, there were stains and damage.
Grapes from a century before.
Evidence of a previous oak tree branch falling across an old spill participating.
The stain was just being what spilled things become when dry and Merciful.
A male red cardinal alive and frozen.
Carrying with it the same weight as everything else that winter keeps.
---
Not temples built to capture light.
But rooms made humble enough that light might choose to enter.
This is also how certain animals are allowed to survive through Mother Earth's harshest days.
This is also how traditional poems get obliterated.
A curious stain is not forgiven.
It becomes part of the constellation.
---
Be kinder with us now.
And learn all about ghosts of our past.
Merciful images projecting in a turtle's bald head.
This is what happens when prophets enable it.
Remember also the things that were falling.
Refusing to be a monumental colonial memorial formed to a bronze surface for white avian excrement droppings.
Knowing nothing.
Move on to an Indigenous vision of voyage.
You get to pick which beings that have been here before you do not want around because they snore.
This beautiful garbage.
We will keep all of it in our will.
---
Something is teaching about how to compost.
Analysis becomes material.
Then becomes soil for a next growth.
Then becomes gone.
There is something almost unbearably tender within innocent inherit presences.
Even though many of them are inconvenient.
---
Practice made with a peace instrument.
Correct us if we are wrong.
We are listening.
---
Again.
A curious stain is not forgiven.
It becomes part of the constellation that feels true.
Mercy without absolution.
Things just becoming what they become and nothing else.
This works as a kind of quiet instruction.
Buried in how to read while composting.
Earning a place to land.
A posture we do not encounter often.
Weak openness without fainting.
An invitation that never grovels.
