Christopher Phelps
Axiomancy
Some sort of fanciful word that came to me as I walked in the woods with my companion. My house-dweller and I, out for a spell. Out we dwelled for an afternoon well under treeline in the middle of late spring, the sun coming through and moving off, a breeze cool enough to sense was cold-adjacent, dry as hope for the meager accumulation of snow. Whatever snow there is to melt is fresh water for the tender growth to spin the wheel again. We talked only briefly, both in our heads, at rare intervals aloud. Listening with our steps, watching with glimpses of the way ahead. I feel like becoming a small-b buddhist if I’m not already — I think but do not say. I meander about, orbiting the mood that arises and moves along. (Not away, and neither like a latch I feel a need to touch.) This page we share, the leap we live. The gathered time in decades, the years beginning to count themselves, about the number one can see in a glance. Ten coins on a table, ten remaining seeds in the feeder, all fingers present and in working order. The found, sparsile stars, released as they are. As for our glimpse of things of value, here in the open air without a tag or sell-by date, I wonder if I could call it divination. In lieu of tossed lots or the look of birds; instead of know-me runes cut into aspen bark. Facing value as a being, not a flight, not a stepped-on step. Axios: value. Unknowable, however known, however much a walk from stump to stone. (Most of the walk around them, thinking of Weil’s notion of metaxu: every separation is a link.) Nobody’s, anybody’s, or some body’s arch or stipulated faith, value as a homemade kind of strength. A clutch of leaves, caught in idiosyncratic time. A stretch that doesn’t break into bits only to claw them back. No atoms, however intricate, that can tell you what they mean. A lingering respect for the mystery of life and the certainty of error. No mosaic but the music of two lives tandem-lived, overlapping everywhere — a spill from a cup and a hand to hold it up — one hand from each of two human stations, becoming no correct amount of familiar. Is there a recognition less about the head? Not a posted sign, less a phrase. A word I wasn’t searching for, fell. You-are-here, without the syllables; intact, lacking a map in front of us. Minus the fear of having missed something important along the way (where the arrows meet the words). Back up the long ramp of Bear Wallow, the last leg of the triangle of trails that were our travels that day, we walked with the breath we had. We dug a little deeper than we knew. At one point, stopping for water and breeze, one of us finished a sentence the other just unearthed:
These steps, they’re like — this steep had many children.
And If Their Depth Isn’t So Much a Cavern of Horrors and Delights
In response to a Facebook group’s meme that read, “My kink is people who explore their depth,
instead of just polishing the surface.”
That’s alright. If it’s an encampment or an archipelago
or even a series of trenches, all out of order, like any litter of towns
that bring some relief from the landscape, that’s alright.
I can’t look at the mirror long. There’s so much burnished glare
hidden in doctored sight. Bright and flagging hopes
singing different songs at the same time,
and sound doesn’t very well overlap
unless there are waves that stand still, while others pass,
enough of these waves waving in their bivouac to make
a playground jump rope. Now that my knees are middle-aged,
I wish I’d joined those girls who I thought made me fear
my own clumsiness. They didn’t. I did, comparing them
to gym class, where any fun or joy in discovery
was against the rules. The posted and unposted rules
in their aura of do it right or you’ll suffer, once the whistle,
twice the ensuing snickers. Everyone knows these snickers
come from nerves of new and nervous creatures,
whose skin is originally thin. Where thickness is learned
from invented contests that must be won since
we no longer have prey to hunt. Since
we’ve been our own prey for some time now.
I take a moment to wonder how long. Since written records
could keep track of debt? Since someone in a cave
or a hut was there to record what someone else did
or said? At least. Nobody could say for certain
why invention’s mother was calling kids and father,
maybe from all the way across the caldera
(where the grass is green and the land is flat,
so animals get at that). These anemic beings
we’ve become, full of spurts and muscle
spasms, where once the sweet birds sang.
Sweet birds we rarely ate, because they’re small.
And something small enough (for example, a single pock)
perhaps escapes our notice. Since we have been groomed
to be prowlers of the present, all the while presentable.
It’s kind of gross, what we’ve learned to overlook.
Is it alright? Are we? Now that time is full of craters
we say we didn’t make. We say were here, well before
we lost our fur and shaved the rest, then stopped,
for a while, pretending we’re not halfway to nowhere
without a middle, and halfway back
from someone who never was
so stocked and stoked with purpose. Never was
so beautiful in the gloam and in the morning
when two stars become one wish for the night
to have been alright. To have been just a time
for the orchestra to grind through the tune.
For our sipped and slowing breath to catch us up.
Christopher Phelps lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he teaches math and interrelated mysteries. Queer and neurodivergent, autistic and aphantasiac, these twainbows underwrite his creative steadfascination. The author of a poetry chapbook, Tremblem, together with the full-length collections, Cosmosis and Word Problems, he has poems in journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Broken Lens, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Poetry Magazine, and Zoeglossia. Newer and brand-new manuscripts, Salve Age and Nearvous, respectively, are questing for publication. Find more at christopher-phelps.com.
