Cut Up Poem - Tjurna djugurba

*I think this poem is one in a series. The next one will be a chant, a calling of the world into being.

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Tjurna djugurba means ‘the footprints of the ancestor’ and ‘the way of the law’

shining semen among the leaves…

along the lengths of an embryo’s flanks,
a series of segments forms

one commonly held delusion is that men are wanderers and women guardians…

at the places where the shoulders and the hips will be,
the signals tell the outer cells to grow rapidly

I see no reason why gesture would not have been passed along with oral history

eclipses, sunspots,
the earth’s magnetic field,
and body chemistry

X as in flower, Y as in berry

the buds grow like tulips,
stretching out into flattened stalks and
blooming into crowns of fingers and toes

leaving her hands free for gathering roots or berries

a tortoise retires into a shell- a hedgehog raises its spines

the human being as the measure for all things

-may fail to give a heart a life-saving jolt

nice, tight, obedient circles

repeated scratches and notches found on stones
marginally prehensile toes

the man in blue walks through the spinifex

continuity: of the heart moves

semen, among the cabbage palm frond

‘You mean that they were born in the desert?’-

thunder shaking the clouds

large snake, at the billabong
edged with bamboo

This poem is a cut-up of The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, Technicians of the Sacred edited by Jerome Rothenberg, Overlay: Contemporary Art And The Art Of Prehistory by Lucy R Lippard and "From Developing Limbs, Insights That may Explain Much Else" by Carl Zimmer in The New York Times, April 7, 2009