Dane Cervine
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The Koan of Consciousness My brain is mostly water, with a little fat and protein thrown in. Surprisingly soft, like tofu, or overcooked Jell-O pudding. It’s never seen the world, exists in silence and darkness. No pain receptors. No capacity for feeling. Like taps of Morse code, a stream of electrical pulses rushes at it with chaotic ambiguity. Out of this bare and neutral cacophony, it creates the world I know. All of it, materializing, each second, on the inside of me. Who knows what’s really out there? I’ll never know. The tofu of me vibrates inside with each clue, each coded message. ** This poem will be included in the collection, Children of Obscura, to be published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2026. ** Interbeing is Not Only Metaphor Twelve thousand years ago—the end of the last Ice Age—ten thousand of us began to spread across the globe. Now, we number in the billions—each, quietly and rhythmically, breathing in then out twenty thousand times a day. Seven million times yearly, many millions of breaths in a lifetime. With each one, 25 sextillion molecules of oxygen come and go from your lungs and mine—by the end of the day, we’ll inhale one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived. In turn, we’ll be inhaled from time to time by every person born till the sun burns out. Even then, we’ll be scattered again like seeds. Who knows where we may end up next? ** This poem will be included in the collection, Children of Obscura, to be published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2026. ** The Question Bone Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops. H. L. Mencken, Minority Report Reality, the astrophysicist says, tenaciously resists easy answers. He wonders if the universe is more slippery than imagined. That like math, reality comes into being through the questions asked of it. And that once asked, can never be unasked. The universe is nuanced enough, he says, to hold a peach, an hour, a swig of whisky, along with black holes at the center of galaxies. And to create miniscule parts of itself to reflect on the whole catastrophe, as though it were the best ride in the cosmos. He ends the book with three questions: Who am I? What is this? Where, from here? As though the universe, like a dog, has buried the asking itself deep in each bone. ** This poem will be included in the collection, Children of Obscura, to be published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2026. ** The Blue Hole Unlike a black hole in space, the Blue Hole in the Red Sea lies deep below the surface. Through the sinkhole wall, there’s a small channel to open sea. Natalia, a free-diver, was one of the first to traverse this path, after more than a hundred others died. She dove the Blue Hole on a single breath, drawn as others were by complex longing, the allure of the self dissolving in intimate depths. It was later, while diving in shallow waters, just for fun, that she disappeared. Her body never found. ** This poem will be included in the collection, Children of Obscura, to be published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2026. ** The Freedom to Have Everything Now, it’s the soft power of imperialism. The culture of Me, that everyone wants. There’s enough life, liberty, and happiness to go around—but not enough for everyone to have everything. The fallacy at the heart of not only desire, but Moloch, as Ginsburg howled. Old wisdom says it is only the open hand that has a chance. The fist, a fortress with nothing inside. ** This poem is from an unpublished manuscript The Democratic Dreams of Animals & Gods. ** Lightning, Bully, Nerve Each brain housed in a body is a platform of sorts, a bully pulpit, an organ of apprehension for some immensity that needs us. The body politic. A human being is a neuron in the universe body; a life, the wave function that arcs through it like lightning. Flash, dazzle, flare. Each citizen a nerve, if we have the nerve, to be part of the whole damn thing. ** This poem is from an unpublished manuscript The Democratic Dreams of Animals & Gods. ** Dane Cervine’s recent books of poetry include The World Is God’s Language (Sixteen Rivers Press), Earth Is a Fickle Dancer (Main Street Rag), and The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword (Saddle Road Press). Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, Caesura, and been nominated for multiple Pushcarts. His work appears in The SUN, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, Pedestal Magazine, among others. Dane lives in Santa Cruz, California. Visit his website at: https://danecervine.typepad.com/ |
