I'm Simple in Your Arms

Jellies in the Sky, Cacti in the Water, Solar Sculptures by Shana Koenig

At the age of seven, he composed fictions about life
In the vast desert, where luminous Liberty lies in her abduction,
Forests, sun, riverbanks, savanna!—
 -Rimbaud
 

In shimmer of day.
In wash of coolness pouring from an arroyo.
Purples of canyon wall echoed in shaft of century plant.
Blazing blue, buzzing green, bones whiten in the the explosion of light.
Rain perfume. A sheen of dust on the blood on the rock.

I'm simple in your arms.
There am I still. 
In dark, in light.
Lights reflex us: stop, go, like.
Colors tickle retinas
stimulate optic nerve
shoot electrochemical impulses to brain which
transmutes zaps to mind then flickers into "I"-light.

Screen lights as reminders
to complete the multitude of shadow tasks
which are humans' due in this automated and connected world:
be here, buy that, pay this, reserve it fast,
remember this other tangled nexus of complexity you signed up for over there.
Programmed.
Track this accountable obligation. That debt.
Align this personal indenturement with maximum value extraction.
Erect that professional compromise. 
Hurry to the halfway measure. Check.
 

Few are the art lights which remind us to be still.
To be delighted.
To be human. Connect, to savor, to revel.
Be still to be this simple.
The waters run against floating cacti bobjects in the current.
The anchored, the lighted, the created
oscillate against the forces of rope and flow.
The rope lights oscillate and bob.
Programmed.
Living, alive, enlivened in water and wind.
They light, they refuge, they still us,
We public, we lost.
Still and simple in your arms.