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Chronicles of the mutant rain forest

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The jungle is a tantalizing place, from the outside. Consider this image from "Holos at an Exhibition of the Mutant Rain Forest", one of the collaborative poems by Bruce Boston and Robert Frazier:

In one corner of the frame, a single patch of light has

penetrated the dense canopy. As it breaks through the

growth, the pattern it etches upon the leaves creates

the illusion of a ghostly face, with wide-set eyes and

lips compressed, silently watching the scene below.

In these lines we are allowed to be voyeurs from a safe vantage point (one of the few times this happens in the book -- in almost every other poem the Mutant Rain Forest will ravage those who cross its boundaries)

-- the face looking out from the hologram image could very well be our own, looking in, as this verdant abyss also watches us in turn.

Poem after poem takes us past this threshold, and it is a savage journey. Flora will root and bloom in flesh; lusts will be scratched in bloody lines under the skin, as demon and animal lovers appear and leave their marks; fires will rage and be consumed themselves by the rain and regrowth of unstoppable green; delirium will claim minds. Many of the seekers portrayed come to points of revelation, but it seems impossible for any true answer to be uncovered in a place where a moment's vision will rot or be devoured in an instant, to be replaced by another image equally vivid, radiant, and fleeting. There is a moment when light itself contains voices of message and transformation (in Boston's "Mutant Illumination"):

Where it is rumored that in a valley yet to be mapped,

somewhere in the vast interior of this organic labyrinth,

light, the very spiritus lux incarnate,

roams the treetop canopy silently

from branch to intertwining branch...

After a journey through images of light so lush and rich with depth that they are intoxicating, the poem ends:

...and you will know with a certainty akin to madness

that all the unnamed appetites of your questing soul

could soon be sated...

A promise like that is hard to keep, and yet time and again these poems take you to that edge where appetite itself can be tasted. Like the nature of the jungle, that taste is dizzying, overwhelming...in Frazier's "Stigmata", the poem's narrator is even entranced by a violent knife wound in his own body:

Cut to the bone and gristle, but little blood - as if the

wound grew there,

and the incision had only served to unfold

its clean pink secrets.

This is a book that will cut deep, and the pain of those wounds, like those of the narrator above, will be raw but sublime. I was seduced and battered by these works, and will return to them again and again when the deadening routines of ordered life demand a scream, or a bursting need to feel mysteries and energies that are green, and hot, and siren-calling.