Reduction

Vestigial leavinges
and fragmentes.
These. However: whole—
         like us
a piecing together;

         Recovered
—or a kind of gluing,
like dinosaurs from Hell Creek Formation,
with soft tissue and blood vessels inside
         femurs.

Recursive
is not the point, not even
Chomsky’s theory—embedding entities
within like entities—a tree structure.
Because the most powerful ancient

Amazon cultures, who resist
change, have no stories
for what came before. There, prosody—present tense:
woman winding raw
cotton, child at her feet, singing

a series of notes,
like a muted horn (what
sounds).
         What

is not enough about this? Could we fall prey

to transcendence,
and reduce, to a point that is
fugitive; you are at the tip

of my tongue, then
not. Just like a leaf drifting
out of the picture. It’s called

xibipio—
not simply gone,
but out of experience. Of Christ
they ask: Have you met
         him?