Contact Zone

  

                                     

We walk downhill toward the creek, this last afternoon
of uncut hay, the blazing sky, the swelter,
hours for that half mile. We pass the crushed jay,
we pass the quick-dead squirrel, offering herself
to the vulture. In two days, she’ll be ten thousand worms.

How the air cools as we descend. The fireflies have fallen
in June. Tree frogs sing the dark, distant stars.
Coyotes. All three dogs raise their heads and yowl.
The moon folds chicory blooms, distorts wild daisies,
coats me in alabaster light. Airlines drone in middle space.

We cross the water with Charon, greet Pluto. Water
speaks, music and memory. We laugh. We turn back.

I leap from branch to branch, full of silken chatter.
I fly. I show off my fine blue and white feathers.

* * *

“A ‘contact’ perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other….It treats the relations…in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.”
       Mary Pratt, Imperial Eyes (in Donna Haraway, When Species                 Meet, 216)

“What if we imagined a human nature that shifted historically together with varied webs of interspecies dependence?”
       Anna Tsing, Friction (in Donna Haraway, When Species Meet,               218)

“Contact zones change the subject—all the subjects—in surprising ways”
       Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, 219

“metaplasmic rearrangement”
       Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, 219