THE ORIGINAL WORLD

A piece of bark given by a baobab tree sits on the altar. On it are the tracks and scrapings of beetles, worms and termites, the inscriptions of lives she once held. An elephant might have rubbed that piece of bark loose, or the tree might have lent it to the ground beneath her in the partnership of sheltering they have developed over time. In Africa, baobabs are known as ‘upside down trees’ because their branches look like gnarled roots. The elephants rub and rub against them until the trees get hollowed out. But this does not kill them. They simply regenerate from the inside out. Much of savannah life seeks refuge inside those hollow trees: birds, insects, foxes, bees, snakes and sometimes fugitives, usually poachers. Inside the hollow, the bark forms a rough skin with whorls and creases that look like the tips of elbows, or vulva, or turtle shells, each sculpted pattern a universe. In spring, the trees are festooned with huge, elongated fruits covered with circles that look like eyes looking at nothing, seeing everything.

Baobabs live for thousands of years. I want to know what they know, in the way they have come to know it. I want to see the elephant herds as the baobabs saw them, huge and unchallenged by farmers or tourists or hunters in helicopters.

Baobabs bring time with them. They are carriers of secrets known only to themselves. They look like they’re dancing or embracing as they reach their branches tenderly around the heat-shimmering air, or the icy stars, and make long-fingered perches for the moon when she grows weary and wants to sit awhile in the noisy night silence. She gathers the light of earth’s turning and pours it through the baobab’s branches, creating shadows like webs of veins as together they x-ray the night. Bats and leopards, hyenas and scorpions watch the show, a nocturnal audience whose clicks and coughs, grunts and screeches knit the world together.



This is a remnant of the original world and its perfect contradictions. This is Eden because it contains all the hair-brained experiments ever conducted by mad-scientist coyote Creator. It is an encyclopedia of love in all her forms. And it’s a great big, badass, who’s-your-daddy, walk-in closet big enough for death’s entire wardrobe.

I want to share breath with all the herds, especially the rhinos, with their impossible horns and their armored plates that belie the softness of their snouts, soft as a horse’s muzzle or a grandmother’s cheeks. I know this because I kissed one once, a rhino in Texas, of all places, as far from baobabs as one can get. He came to the edge of his enclosure and when I sang to him he leaned his face against the taut metal wire of the fence and fell asleep, his face rumpled against the fence post from the weight of his massive head, as he leaned forward bending one front leg, balanced like a dancer on the tip of his hoof. I moved my hands slowly toward him until his tender-skinned nose was cupped in my hands, and then I leaned in a little further until I could smell his grassy breath, sweet and dusty, breathing in as he breathed out, breathing out as he breathed in, until stacks of eons fell away, my lungs filled with the breath of his kin, all his ancestors all the way back through 65 million years, and I could smell the spaciousness of original time, smokeless and silent, as it gathered itself and fell forward.

Baobabs bring time with them. They are carriers of secrets known only to themselves. They look like they’re dancing or embracing as they reach their branches tenderly around the heat-shimmering air, or the icy stars, and make long-fingered perches for the moon when she grows weary and wants to sit awhile in the noisy night silence. She gathers the light of earth’s turning and pours it through the baobab’s branches creating shadows like webs of veins as together they x-ray the night. Bats and leopards, hyenas and scorpions watch the show, a nocturnal audience whose clicks and coughs, grunts and screeches knit the world together.

This is the original library, a source text written in fur and sand, claw and hide and dung, the library before Alexander, and before Alexandria. This is the archive that, if it burns, cannot be recovered. There has been a terrible accident and we have been struck in the head by greed that has erased all memory of where we came from, amnesia of the heart, and only the tender caress of the Beloved will awaken us. It is not for us to ask to be inscribed in the book of Life for one more year, but rather to beg that the Book of Life be inscribed in us again. Then we must read each page until the letters dance before us and we leap from our seats to join them.



There has been a terrible accident and we have been struck in the head by a greed that has erased all memory of where we came from, amnesia of the heart. Only the tender caress of the Beloved will awaken us. It is not for us to ask to be inscribed in the book of Life for one more year, but rather to beg that the Book of Life be inscribed in us once more. We must read each page until the letters dance before us and we leap from our seats to join them. This is the original library, a source text written in fur and sand, claw and hide and dung, the library before Alexander, and before Alexandria. This is the archive that, if it burns, cannot be recovered.