Epistemology of the Fern

ipislemulugy^^theJEem >ara Pennington This world is not my home, I'm just a-passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. —Baptist Hymn In the hollows, in the deep geologic ruts of Appalachia, old saints—the bright sunken eyes, hair the color of dried bones, the high voices— sing an antiphony: in this world but not ofit. Here, floodwaters groan against clapboards, the stammering roar, that tympani under the creaking soprano of planks. Noise oflack, space that wants space, crack in this place between two: this voice is both other and neither. And the pre-flooded field? Green. Yes, it must be green if it must be anything at all. And so, part of it: the blue that is not blue, the mirage of color in the sky. The curvilinear layers more no Sara Pennington than the particles, the pollen, the ancient combusted fern. Has it always been seen this way: the sky? If the wind did not bruise itself against the firmament, would there ever have been the green that now recedes? And now of the green that is resurging: tendrils roiling across corrugated rust. The green finger of rebirth knowing no floodplain. And so I learn: I am only a blástula of knowledge, a speck dividing on the tip of a stem, a daughter cell trapped—parents and progeny, bristling, turgid, part of it all, threading in either direction, exponentially, and, too: a ball around which history gathers, a dandelion seed, rusting wagon wheel. This life is larger than anything I will ever know. And smaller. Ill ...