Barry Goldman 2001 sow_thistle@yahoo.com Breath a christmass poem. the birth of god. why does presence/miracles need woman's wombs to enter the world? Begin in the forest. Deep quiet full of texture. majestic but not static. Every year a few trees get knocked down by thunderstorms and the forrest keeps churning with successional growth. Tree roots mesh with soil, with each other. Bark merges into soil, bugs. Roots embraced by mushroom tounges. I remember sitting in my favorite sycamore tree on campus, it waves with the wind and I can see out through the leaves and they shade me from the sun. The leaves tinkle and flutter in the wind, make a papery wind chime music. The tree grew, embodying the shapes of years, months, days of sun going round into its trunk and branches. Embracing the wind into its own shapes that fit my body and echo the shapes of hills I can see through the branches. to get into a tree a got to climb with my whole body It's not enclosed. it has texture. it's actually growing while I sit in it. Ants live on it. Its leaves are formed, are born, in the tiniest, quietest, little factories, the bud tips, and unfurl. And the leaves are veined. When they are exhausted they go through this tiring out process, each cell like the leaves themselves going away into breath, one by one, this dying out process passing through yellow, red, brown in hues more beautiful and comforthing to my eyes than any man made textile colors. leaving behind gifts intricately carved and textured. This dying out process unfolds the complexity and textures out of which these leaves were made. Tree buds, those thousands of wood shedding... Tree buds, weaving their way upwards towards the sun... Tree buds, openning and closing with the seasons, fluttering through the centuries like green butterflies through the woods Up into the sun Calling their children to follow them generation after generation leaving behind a woven trail of strong wooden branches as a memory shed dresses left behind When tree buds have travelled so high, When bracket fungi and beetle have chewn their woven mountain hollow, When buds die of drought, no strong rivers left to flow through the into hot sunlit days, Or when lightning strikes their home, releasing their wooden work back into the breath it was once pulled out of... But they know this. They grow anther and ovum They mate to mix their mother's and father's pasts They fling gemlike pollen, those heirloom capsules of old stories, into the wind or hang them out to catch flight on woolen bee's thighs send them forth to find fertile ova incite her to grow into a far fearing seed boat marvel of ribosome machinery to entice sun, soil, water, and breath into a whirlpool of biochemical square dances. Not born in factories. Leaves are swarms of brilliant green little one celled chlamydomonas daughters breeding and breeding like siamese twins. Splitting apart, then huddling together in celebratory gatherings. And the shapes and timing and textures are inexact, not strictly repetative, not wholy determined, they are creative! A tree does not build with repetitive bricks and rectangles as we do, but a tree grows with moistness and any random flux from life can alight in the moistness of the tree's growing process and nudge it, and all these nudges carve forms into the tree. Tree is a living complex clay that can be sculpted by surprise. Surprise might break of crack a piece of human architecture, but not only is a tree such a tough flexible being that it can live with surprise, it grows itself, its forms, out of surprise. if all the leaves aren't of uniform size and shape it can live. Cells grow at each other's boundaries simultaneously with pliable woven walls. They shape each other in a dance of give and take. And if they do not end up being all identical packable pylyhedra it's alright, it fits. Living creatures are ways of fitting non identical shapes together. Oh, yes, and how do sycamore leaves, my lover's eyes fall into specific forms if they have grown with surprise? These living cell beings fall into specific forms! They are not amorphous blobs of living plasm, but with their long legacy of chemical craftsmanship, they maintain discrete forms out of the vast blobby space of all possible forms. And then, due to the ecological situation they find themselves in, interacting with each other and linkded to each other, strung up like beads with each other on the streams of Sun to Void flowing, they drive each other to speciation, varying. Yet species arrive at distinct forms, fixed for long periods of time, And we do not live in the nightmare of a vast continuum of blobby green plasm covering the face of the Earth. The young spring leaves glow bright yellow green in the morning sun. Glow and glisten in their suppleness, matching the suppleness and softness of my lips kissing my lover's soft shoulders. They glow like her eyes. Leaves have hairs like the downy hairs of her belly, and texture of veins sprouting yet more veins sprouting yet more veins themselves. Leaves and I obviously come from the same family! we are in fact both grown by cells within us, these wonderful cells who are already living creatures. The single celled algae and paramecium creatures we each descended from share the same fundamental qualities. You can watch them both in a drop of pond water and see that they are brother and sister, with only minor differences which are magnified when played out in these huge multicellular lives both our families have chosen. What miraculous qualities do these cells share that they can grow woman and sycamore sprig in quiet sensual wombs? they are molecular dances they are fluid able to act and sculpt with surprise responsive quiet masters of maintaining the forms handed down by their ancestors desiring food, shunning pain being linked to each other in ecological cycles having earthy geology and weather patterns and cycles of year, month, and day embodied in them they are playful, inventive, dynamic, they fight hard! they have strong lust for sex with each other in order to play with new combinations of heredity and at the same time to help maintain the hereditary integrity of their species. Then again, sexual reproduction can drive speciation These are very sophisticated acts requiring very highly evolved and sophisticated molecular machinery, molecular dances that cells have evolved over the millions of generations of exploration. These creatures, these cells, are tiny, but even as single cells they are richly textured, having as many moving parts and active agents as does all of New York City! And they come together in millions, billions, to sculpt from the inside our living bodies with veins and cillia and hairs and limbs and joints and nerves and vessels and layers and cavities. And the networks, meshworks, webworks of molecular fibers that they weave betwen themselves makes us tough and supple, giving the joy of climbing a tree waving in a strong wind or touching my bare body to my lover's bare body, supple, rippling soft firm tough muscular. fibers which can imbibe water into their networks to make flesh. Oh! The most obvious fact, living creatures are built with water! Leaves and people are 75% water. How wonderful. Human architects use wood, rock metal patper or plastic but never water. How to envision architecture with water? We are these meshworks of living cells, molecular fibers, lipid membrane bags filled with water. The lipid membranes themselves fluid films that hold together because they repell and won't mix with the wather inside them or outside them. Not only are we made of fluids and fibers, but the fluids and fibers themselves are in continual flux. Bodies of cells filled with water which is not the stale stagnant water that sits in closed sacks, but water that is in continual flow from rain to river to soil to plants to people to breath to air to clouds and again to rain. The water in us does not just sit IN us but Flows through us. We are tributaries of this great gushing swrling of water round and round this Earth. And the water is exhaled with each breath. And The sacs of lipid membranes are not just stagnant films of oil on water, the molecules of fat continually flow in and out of metabolism to be exhaled as a breath of carbon dioxide. And the tough protein fibers and muscles are linked together by nitrogen that also flows through metabolism out the piss as urea into living fermenting soil, because our fibers are not fixed but are in a continual state of assembly and disassembly as our living bodies respond and rearange to the flow of life around ourselves. But the fermenting molding tangle of soil fungi and bacteria exhale urea back into nitrogen gas to the air. And the vapor of the breath goes back to the swirl of clouds and the carbon dioxide of the breath is inhaled by plants and linked into their cellulose fibers to make wood and the nitrogen from the breath of soil bacteria is lassoed, hard fighting molecule that it is, by select tribes of nitro fixing bacteria in the roots of plants to be linked back into protein for us to eat. 90% of what we are, all of us on earth is water and carbon dioxide and nitrogen, all breath! we are not solid at all, in how many short weeks will what percent of me become air again? We are just momentary coming together places of breath. Not things, more like temporary aquaintances between characters in a long epic narrative. Our flesh is like a song sung with the breath. It is ephemeral. But our forms are not. Our forms are passed down from generation to generation like songs or stories. The forms of species last on the average of two to ten million years, some stories, like that of the horse shoe crabs has been handed down from generation to generation through fourty million tellings and has not been lost! And the distinct form of the undulating whiplash fiber in the tail of all plant and animal sperm has been handed down from cell to cell, individual to individual, even from species to species as they evolve, I don't know how many billions of times. Handed down precisely! We've carried it with us for at least a billion years on this journey. Every living creature on this planet, more than 10 million of them, from redwood tree to single celled dinoflagelate, forms his sperm tails with the same exact pattern.