Domain
Domain
abundance, or, that
which belongs to each:
library cards
shadow
the possessive apostrophe
radio hits and Hallelujah
hotel bibles and knowledge wholly
the redwood forest to the gulf stream
waters
lightning bugs and their tall grass
the greenish-grey nose of drizzle
fear, love and other arrows
urls when the credit card expires
death
a vine of beans
make believe
open sea and
this list unfurling,
soon, maybe even
presently, Mickey, the mouse, rejoicing
rid of man’s manacles.
Who among us prepares the bed and stew
in this meek office of the common?
This year I may be giving myself more little prompts. This week’s was to write a “list poem” and as I was about to shut my computer and begin writing I saw an email come in about Steamboat Wille (an early iteration of Mickey Mouse) entering the public domain … so with those perplexing shaped instruments in hand, I set them at either end of the page to eventually meet.
In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz speaks at length about “enclosure” or the time in which the English redacted prior land usage and access rights held by commoners. Although England had already been feudal (with Barons owning the land) for a few hundred years, this shift was made to make agriculture ‘more efficient’ and profitable. Dunbar-Ortiz draws attention to how the shift to enclosure happened just before the colonization of the United States and how this relatively new lens of privatization and discrete land ownership shaped the severity and mechanisms of colonist eradication/removal of the indigenous populations.
Definitions of “Domain:”
an area of territory owned or controlled by a ruler or government.
a specified sphere of activity or knowledge.
a distinct subset of the internet with addresses sharing a common suffix or under the control of a particular organization or individual.
It’s interesting, I wasn’t thinking of this poem as a revised definition for the word domain, but after reading it aloud for the recording, perhaps.
Thanks for reading.