This little piece of experimental prose may at first seem like a stilted ecological allegory, but it has nothing to do with ecology. It was written at a moment when one chapter of my life was about to eject me right into another. It came to me while I was walking the trails of the Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve one last time before moving away from the Puget Sound region. Although it may appear I was fixated on concerns about invasive plant species, I was in fact dreaming about a certain redheaded rascal out in Walla Walla. Discrete geographical locations and disparate worlds of the spirit were blurring in my mind as this came to me. To get a sense of the type of scenery I was taking in as I composed it in my mind, see my page about the South Sound Prairies.
A tale of struggle:
Loki Asaram Caudatam strode across the prairie. He loved the haunting sound of its winds and the ospreys that rode the currents. His nose was pink and freckled with the harsh favor of the sun, and the dust rising from the neighboring wheat fields colored the corners of his eyes a tender red.
Loki did not like the invasive Scotch broom that was overtaking the prairie, disrupting the centuries-old ecological equilibrium—the nitrogen balance, too. He looked with contempt upon the agile bees that used their dexterity for ill. In their greed for nectar they were all too happy to be complicit in perpetuating the spread of this toxic invader, whose showy golden flowers were a distraction—an emotional manipulation of the masses. Few recognized the plant later in the season when its flowers senesced and its ugly, graceless stems were easily camouflaged against the dormant green-browns of the prairie. It was then that it did its worst.
Some accused Loki of clinging to an ecosystem that could exist no more. Why not embrace novel ecosystems? Why preserve that which the forces of time and nature had deemed obsolete? Did Tom Waits not say it best? “You can drive back nature with a pitchfork, but it always comes rolling back again…”
On a rainy day Loki Asaram Caudatam made a bed of soft reindeer lichen and took a nap in the mist between two Mima mounds. He dreamt of mass extinction events on Earth: an asteroid that plunged the planet into rains of glass and temperature extremes, such that the dinosaurs were of a sudden no more.
He saw all of geological history laid out before him. Before there was the earth, there were the stars, and before the stars there was nothing, or maybe something. And after the earth what would there be? 10,000,000 years from now would prairies or Scotch broom persist?
As he sleeps between the mounds, golden hue of Scotch broom cast over his dawn-colored hair, he has feverish dreams from which he awakes screaming. Something is terribly wrong and always has been wrong, and no matter how he bolts across the prairie, wild heart pounding powerfully in his chest, he cannot outrun it.
Loki, how stunning is your darkness. And Loki, how natural and bold is the red you drew across the flute of the despicable buzzard. And Loki, how did it feel? And how does it feel to walk the blue-green patterns of your mind that spiral in on themselves like deliciously sadistic switchbacks, three or seven at a time? How does it feel to have a febrile god writhing so beautifully in your mortal body?
Loki Asaram Caudatam, my mind keeps wandering to you. I think of how you looked the first time I saw you striding across the prairie, and how you’ve looked each time since. There is something hard and guarded in your facial expression and bearing. On that first day it seemed you were perched on some Thanatos edge.
I run to you across the prairie like an opal-winged moth to a supernova; I watch your hardness condense into a sacred coal-black strength. You pull me into your arms and something chivalrous in you responds to the sweetness in me, and our terrifying, soft-edged glows become one hot-blue center of the flame.
Ogma Editing 