FIELD NOTES from Indra's Net "and pretty soon there’s my arm !" with Donna Fleischer
and pretty soon there’s my arm ! :
A Field Notes baedeker
by Donna Fleischer
On assignment in the Exit Strata Field Notes office sans walls. Mountain air and wild clover nitrogen sacs beneath rockshelf. Fertility Wampum. Barefoot through their unseen globules, nodules, atop sandy patterns the width and wavinesses of a snake’s movements, as in many Navaho textile weavings, as are the photograms of Adam Fuss. How I try to mostly (write) now, undulate, corporealize and scrabble across this Connecticut steppe and mountain ridge meadow.
Morning blueberries, raw almonds, coffee, black cat, garter snake, mockingbirds swoop and dip into the small clover clumps; read mainstay poets with field glasses and compass ~ Charlie Mehrhoff, Amy King, Karma Tenzing Wangchuk, purple crown vetch and a stand of Queen Anne’s Lace tall from rain, Noelle Kocot, Ana Božičević, Tim Trace Peterson, Filip Marinovich, Tyrone McDonald, David Pontrelli, mountain winds, CAConrad, Anne-Adele Wight, bird squawks, Scott Watson, Bob Arnold, Ariana Reines, Christina Pacosz, Lynn Behrendt, marlene mountain, just can’t name them all ~. My neighbor April just came home in her red Beetle. Its motor purrs. The weather is magnanimous. Here’s the skull of Phineas Gage, poor man, lodged in my brain. I retrieve the railroad tie, place it in the ground, as totem. Who is to know how it all begins, goes forth, stumbles along, falls and crawls back with earthworm writhe to write.
(If I hadn’t got to the Internet in time where would I be now? after quitting that killer production job where I wrote long afternoon / my colleague’s plastic frog / stares back //. I began with e-mail letters, loop the loop to Facebook, a frog’s blog at word pond, even to a Facebook page named for a chapbook that no longer exists, well, I caught up with the world.)
Nietszche wrote that one ought never to trust a thought that wasn’t had by walking, and I definitely do not, and pretty soon 
there’s my arm!, hand, another one, legs and eyelids, liver, stomach, lungs, toes. Here I am, scrolling trapeze, clanging a brass bell for e pluribus unum. Gotta take written samples, see if I’m still toxic from the years of dead lead numb production they call work. How otherwise can the letters float into words, phrases, lines?
Saved by the Net, Neruda’s, Adrienne Rich’s, that indra’s net poetry chapbook. I wrap those nets up in my arms and make me whole again, poetries, the periodic table, those soft, muscular ricochets of e-mail, blogpost, Facebook, every day, present tense. Let go of notebooks and loosen.
Better eat something. The big, black cat is asleep. I’ll be quiet. The wind is not quiet here on the mountain ridge nor is it noisy, like machines. It sounds itself, plays tree, grass, wildflower, lamp pole, garage door, ears. Last night I watched the documentary “The Last Mountain”. So many natural places for wind turbines, yet we’re blowing off the Appalachian mountaintops to get the coal to sell to the people who make those mountains home. 
In trouble chant Oh earth sky nakazora ouroboros coyote bear human salmon turkey buzzard plant insect beings of the infinite realmsof being hear our lamentation for we see only our reflection when we look into the waters and do not feel how we worship at the altars of destruction. Help us see past all illusion that separates us from you.
Teach us to flow once again.
The livingdying rhythms of each season as it comes. There’s no pre-select stations on this planet. We don’t get to feel one 
feeling only. Feel one, touch all the others. Be the bee being alive. You’re sure to be dead someday. These are the waves, the threads, the wanderings, the clinamen swerves. It’s Music. Collage. Geode. Magma. Photograph. Print. Ocean. Carvings. Friends. Site installation. Poetry. Mystery. The Coming and Going that is home.
