poetry notebook

Rivers of blood converged through millennia, 

each conversion an expansion and contraction

until diverted into two forks, where the one

they had become split and shrank

to a single sperm in a man’s testicles

and an egg in a woman’s ovary. 

Too many events brought this about 

to even begin to enumerate, a similar

process had occurred for each of his

parents, rivers into sperm and egg, 

thousands of thoughts per day, 

millions of minute actions, desires, 

dislikes, meetings and partings when

one day, his mother took his father’s

erect penis into her body as they

became submerged in the streams

that had become them and strove

to reunite a stream that had split 

and flowed through each of them 

until ejaculation squirted sperm

hard at the matrix of the egg 

and one microscopic minnow

managed to maneuver through 

the chasm and find a means to penetrate

his female self in the warmth and darkness.

I’m sure you know how that goes.

But the dead inhabit those rivers

and each of the dead is her own river

and rivers blend together and mix

their identities but one of them was 

Jokul Thorstein, 

the greatest poet 

who has ever lived. Sadly,  

no-one had ever even read

a single poem of his before they

all burned to fine ash and were 

forever lost. As he lay dying of 

a self-consuming mentality

realization of the loss to others

and himself filled him with remorse.

His life had been difficult, because

he was a difficult person — stubborn,

self-centered, brilliant but insecure, 

emotional, indulgent, jumping

from subject to subject like a

schoolboy all the way into old age, 

who was never sure he really belonged

anywhere. 

And there were many more

in that river.

Women, too. One a scientist who, 

a moment before a stroke demolished her

had visualized and comprehended 

a unified theory, simple, easy to prove, 

encapsulated in a formula no larger than

E equals MC squared. She was

always tightly controlled, methodical, 

her thought process was a surgical

procedure, without emotion, precise

and cold, undaunted by any obstacle, 

fearless, ascetic, yet affable, friendly,

social and somewhat exotic.

To say that these two lives were the dominant

streams in this case isn’t meant to imply

that the sperm and egg that made Rhosonny

was a simple mixture of the two. We speak

here of tendencies, but the channel

is irregularly shaped with obstacles

and plunges and many other beings living

in the river so that moment into moment

no tracing back will lead you to previous

incarnations: the complexity

of the solution 

requires trillions 

of instructions 

per 

nano

second 

to 

separat

e it 

into 

con

stituent 

com

ponents.

But these streams, these channels, are full of

thousands of species and thousands of individuals

of each species, who are also so composed until

it circles back into the fetus that was Rhosonny

before he came, bewildered, into a world

of panicking doctors because he didn’t cry

when they pulled him out of his mother, 

and they thought he should be older than he was.

His parents loved him. His mother’s life 

revolved around him. If his father hadn’t been 

shipped out for the next 18 months, 

what might not have been different?

And yet, his father loved him.

He was a quiet, fragile, though

somewhat large, infant who was often

kept in the hospital. 

And so ends the birth of Rhosonny.