The Glass Hammock

​My hammock is my safety net,
strung between branches or beams,
swinging and zipped up against mosquitoes.
Off the ground, away from other worries,
I’m swung into sleep.
Simply knotted skimpy strings suspend me nightly,
and flex to form my catenary cradle.

In the future I will lie sleepless, adrift,
on the flat mattress of the bed I call home.
Looking back I’ll see my distant hammock,
as if it had been made of glass.
A tiny fragile tangle of strands.
An incandescent filament, a spangle of light
in the vast forest of blind night.

But that is still to come.
For now my hammock is my safety net,
I am embraced in space,
or afloat, like a canoe,
buoyed up on the flux and moored between trees,
secure, stem and stern,
until the morning.

PETROGLYPHS IN THE
CASIQUIARE CHANNEL

von Humboldt passed this way, away back then.
Those yonder days. Hazy images form from when
he cast his gaze on these pecked and graven lines
that graze the midstream stones. Ancestral signs
not erased by Orinoco’s ebb and flow
or whirlpools, floods and undertow.

Humboldt’s passage lay in blank geography.
His stray wanderings passed this art of prehistory.
These are ancient glyphs, signatures, indelible traces.
Humankind’s marks, stayed put. Cuts on the faces
of rocks remain, endlessly witnessing
the river’s perpetual emptying.

Humboldt did not stay, but stayed his course.
Far beyond here lies the path that he then draws
on maps. Swept away by downstream currents,
this river-line, incised by time, across a continent’s
face. Humboldt’s voyage happened upon
Orinoco, Casiquiare and Amazon.