Dark Surface

Woman holds up a mirror,                            

seeing through it into a

streambed. Rocks, a mountain

breathing, look, and she’s thinking:

storm breaking on the surface.

Light diffuses; the sky darkens.

At the edges, glass darkens

less-- for the gem-tints mirror

glintwinks across the surface,

smashing the frame into a

quivered light to do your thinking

by the dark of the mountain.

Jewel at her throat, mountain

lights up gem-framed then darkens

like the gloom of hard thinking;

storm cracking away; mirror            

aptly expresses into a                            

map of the mirror’s surface.                  

Rainfall reflects the surface

where light ends on the mountain.

Silver drops hold into a

trembling. Memory darkens

it’s quality; pitted mirror

in one young, goes the thinking.

She is in the stream, thinking

an infant prised the surface

of her thought; or the mirror

in her hand broke the mountain.

Drops glass, everything darkens--

the infant blooms into a

woman, who blurs into a

page of discursive thinking.

Whence the child comes it darkens

unevenly the surface;

child, woman and mountain

disappear in the mirror.

The displaced mountain thinking:

how she darkens the surface

she pulled into the mirror!

Invisible Weeds of Puissance and Pulchritude

There are hidden precincts as close as skin

To you, simulposed, one on another―

   Closed cavern on vacant nether.

   Yes…  covert are the fields they’re in.

      You go to a back lot

But don’t see the cave, where, I shit you not―

I battle my own little Ragnarok,

Scarred by the event as a scald must be,

Missing you in the weeds where you stop to pee.

Where you loft your mindwave against the pale

Yellow edge of the concourse―  the daylight world.

   There your cognition may be purled

   Like a cul-de-sac; but, please, Hail!

      The sacramental pitch―

Tumble-weeded flats, perimeter’d by ditch,

That ants abandoned, squatted on by witch―

All but the mine, the middle of alone,

Where the twilight reigns and the gods turn stone.  

We must, perforce, the ancient rites perform―

The inchoate myth, and the phantasm

   Otherness, just a brief spasm

   From solitude to where we’re borne,

      Into the home life, dear―

A ramble in the empty meadows where

The secret places are from year to year,

The well-swept ground under the temple shell

Where, together, all things may, lonely, dwell.  

The Consolation of Poetry

Lumpen inhales this way and he can die here.

The head turns inwardwise to look at what drives out;  

Which obsessions commandeer, what silent hives abut

The bee glade, what constructions over cellar-fear

Are tilting toward effluvia. Odors of rose

Musk turn stink in the plexus that makes the world.

Despite, senses oppose: the projection is hurled

Upon the rocks and waters; while some suppose

The mind is bent under run-on propositions,

Thought experiments in a requisitioned skull,

Quotidian fissions blasting around a small

Wilderness in a universe of omissions.

Make it the case that the clock hands run widdershins.

That gnome doctors dig for the curative specie

Through cave-bound winds in a brain that bides uneasy.

Spring forward the horse, the rider and all his sins.

Is there art in the final illuminated

Hallways of the gods? The aggregate disperses

Into it’s several inks. The rare nib solved verses

Starring Sphinx― now he too shall be extirpated.