excerpt from…  

​

Instructions on Bifurcation

​

Lesson Five  

Pick anything, anyone. Make them into something greater than they are. This is a familiar activity. Remember when you cast that bastard as a revolutionary hero? Remember all that political rhetoric you used to swaddle your own heart?  

The easiest solution is to make him her or her him. Some kind of biochemical transition. There’s always that Lakota boy who knows enough about women to know they are not born as such; it is something they choose to become. Grammatically speaking there are two ways of being, some assignment the nouns take. But gender is as infinite as sound. Indonesian gamelan ensembles often include three gendér. Most heartbreaks involve three bodies. The best boys were once girls. That girl, the one who broke your heart, she was a boy once too.  

* * 
Seven Sides to the Story  

There are seven bison remaining in California. They live on the slope of an excavated hill. At dawn they cluster together on the western edge of fence. There is no mountainside for them to hide in. White Buffalo Calf Woman gave the Lakota the sacred pipe. She was wakan and could not be harmed by arrow or bullet. The people had other weapons. She gave them seven sacred rituals and then disappeared into the white cloud of their disbelief. There are seven bison and 36,457,549 people in California. The largest terrestrial mammal in North America, the bison live in a paddock the size of a city block. Darkly furred and humped, bison can live for up to 20 years. In captivity their lives are more precarious; they suffer from alcoholism, poverty, a sickness of spirit. 60 million bison once roamed the grasslands of North America. There are seven circling their pen. There is only one way to tell you this. We are endangered. Current rates of depensation make it unlikely that we will ever recover.

 

 * *  
Lesson Eight  

Shem lived for six hundred years and was the progenitor of many nations. His son, a grandson of Noah, settled Aleppo, its old inhabitants. He is dead now; they all are. His name is not. It is the third day of charted time, the land between two rivers. Such fertile soil in which to people the newly cleansed earth.  

The inhabitants of Benin and southeastern Togo practiced voodoo and spoke their name in tongues. When the land was divided into parcels too small to harvest another generation, the people migrated to concrete and steel. A landscape to disappear in.  

In Yoruba, the story holds the earth in its gravity. She is called patron of the forest, that wild wind. To Hindus, she is he, a descendant of the sun god, a consort of nymphs. In America, she took her name for sex and her spirit for a neo Norse pagan, warrior of the Viking age. If she could, she would ravage her people with violent storms. She would whip the soil back into the sea.  

* * 
Lesson Eleven  

Call it superstition or projection. An obsession with the figurative. The sparrow’s nest outside your front door. Or it was your front door, until you walked out of it with your hastily packed bags of clothes, shoes and books. The nest is still there. But the eggs have hatched; the chicks have died. The parents watch the house mournfully from the telephone wire. You could have told them that the nest was poorly built, the walls too low, the placement suicidal. New to procreation, they are still learning. They watched the first two fledglings fall, one by one, their bodies tiny and rigid on the porch. The third hatchling hid in her shell at the bottom of the nest. Weeks later, she is here to greet you. A white strip of feather across each cheek, painted for battle. You are uncertain which act would be the most brave: to leave or to stay. She is perched on the edge of a nest she has outgrown, weighing the odds.  
 

* * 
Lesson Fifteen  

A love poem will not save you. What can you do with a fleeting lyric, some hopeful rhyme scheme? Focus on other kinds of languaging. There is always the immediate satiation of propaganda. Take the cardiac transplant industry. They will tell you, a new heart can save your life. But your body will see the transplant as an infection. That is why rejection medication is necessary. Every day you will have to swallow another pill. Some combination of cyclosporine, tacrolimus, mycophenolate, mofetil, prednisone, azathioprine. This makes you vulnerable to antigens such as thrush, herpes, respiratory viruses. You have a very short prognosis. After a transplant, men have a longer predicted lifespan than women. No one has bothered to explain this. Instead they describe different kinds of procedures, different kinds of hearts. Remember that guy at the party who had a baboon heart? He was drinking malbec in a lead crystal glass and channeling his dead primate. A few months later the man died too. The most successful patient survived 28 years. His heart was taken from the victim of a traffic accident. Blunt force trauma. When the brain dies the heart does not. Your own heart was removed in an orthotopic procedure, the great vessel transected, a portion of the left atrium excised. Before your chest cavity was closed, nothing was sutured to the remaining vessels. Nothing in fact was ever put in its place.  

* * 

Lesson Twenty-Three  

Prairie voles live in the central grasslands. Highly social mammals, they have become the subjects of choice for scientists interested in the biological sources of monogamous pair bonding. This is not a popular activity. Only three percent of mammals engage in social monogamy. Voles are divided on the subject. The male meadow vole does not express the paternal devotion shown by his cousin of the prairie. This causes much family strife. The prairie vole has long repeating strips of DNA dangling like party streamers above a gene linked to vasopressin. This is the best explanation they have for the prairie vole’s uncommon dedication to his mate and young. Vasopressin is released when a body is low on water, causing the kidneys to constrict, to hold onto everything they have. It is hard to imagine this as pleasurable, but monogamy does not always feel good. The meadow vole lives in moist open areas and will abandon his mate, his newborn litter for the dark call of night. But if he is injected with vasopressin, he will return home quickly, the nib of his tail tucked between his stubby legs.  
 

Researchers have identified three neural chemicals associated with monogamy. Oxytocin is a hormone released after orgasm in both sexes and in women during childbirth. If you rub your nipples you may also trigger a rush of. Vasopressin is pressure and its absence. This too makes monogamy possible. Dopamine is that rush of excitement, the nexus of pleasure and repeat performance.  

When we love we are fingering this microscopic string. Another mammalian experiment of. If the DNA snippets dangle just above, we are faithful. If the vasopressin is in short supply, or the oxytocin is depleted, we are more likely to wrap ourselves up in the nearest cotton sheet and waddle to the refrigerator for a late-night snack. Before departing, we will be sure to empty our pockets of everything that was sudden or elating. The night is its own intoxicant. There is a whole world yet to explore.  

* * 
Lesson Thirty-Five  

Somehow, without any warning, your desiccated heart has rehydrated, a bloated corpse in the center of your chest. People can smell it. Rather than being repulsed, they are drawn as if by a pheromone, the way boars detect estrus in sows. You had thought you’d be more desirable heartless, but animals survived by avoiding those among them who could not feel. Newly resuscitated, your emotions are black and iridescent, strange insects pricking the surface of your skin. You wonder if this is what people mean by wearing your heart on your sleeve. You had always pictured something red and bloody, like newly butchered meat. But the sensation is more brittle, as if sheathed in fractured glass. When the light hits you, you are kaleidoscopic. A million fragments of. 
 

* * 
Lesson Forty-Nine  

Only the most irresponsible among them have recommended anything other than medication, several weeks of bed rest. But you have spent a lifetime attracting negligence. Gathering all the useless prescriptions and admonitions, you place them in an enormous bowl in the center of the room. They are like fish swimming around an empty glass. Such unhealthy things really. You wait for them to die one by one. It is not so bad to be alone in an apartment with a jar of dead ideas. It is the people, the ghosts that espoused them, who cause you the greatest concern. When they become too rowdy you slip out to the fire escape and watch the almost city draw to a close. It is not so different from all those nights you spent in the woods telling the stars off. Who are they really to look down on you with such bright indifference? The almost city lights obscure them. With your hands pressed against the metal railing, you search out another cosmology, some imploding luminosity to call your own.

 

Previously printed in Endangered Species, Enduring Values: An Anthology of San Francisco Area Writers and Artists of Color, Pease Press, 2018. 

Reflection Questions:

What are the connections these excerpts draw between humans, animals, and how we survive?

What did the line, "Nothing in fact was ever put in its place" make you think of?

Which images and ideas in this piece will stick with you, and why?

​

​