Spring Blooms as I lay in the Grass
It is of a slow beauty that I speak:
Yet I refuse to hold my eye to the steady mark of the greenest blades of grass.
For numb though the seedlings are, and lipless,
Their meanings fall from other mouths,
And theirs are sculpted words:
Fearful and beautiful spears,
loosed in song
guttural and choral
symphonies of glad-handed raggery
rent always from scarcity
Yet trailing in the white skeins of space,
on the rippling grasses,
A hollowing out aids this slow show of whispery adepts of motion,
And lengthy staves of green flesh clutch hungrily my face,
And the light
It breaks into me in sweltering threads of heavy memory,
And this is the reverie
Of Recollection.
Breathlessness in the Anthropocene
The air thickens as heartbeats thicken:
In clusters, and falling in numbers,
With the stale movement from tick to stopped clock,
Its motion that of mercury chambers and barometers,
Magnets, steam, and anvils of burnt stone,
Valves, and tubes, and pressure gauges,
Hissing, insistently, measuring both the within and the winsome without
That lies alluringly, like a bedded consumptive, their flower fallen flush, plush
As a rose in its ethereal pungency,
Like starlings too, sturnidae: an iridescent backdrop for the complexity
A framing begat even by—just—standing still, through third laws, and cleft right hands at the tiller-
This is true of the ivy too,
And so much else.
Whittling us in its embrace,
And as each moment accelerates and slows,
Weighty with the gravity of being,
Fulsomely, wantonly
In gulps, and gasps-
I yearn for air.
Unity
Spread like thinning butter,
Hearts, reified cognition,
Linearity has stolen death from us.
Yet meaning is succinct,
Etchings in a complex choral unity:
A wilderness.
Thus alike are the pulsar and the swan.
They flare rhythmically,
Gnawing on the detritus of an ocean of stars.
Yet we keep segments of time,
In order to step outside ourselves,
So our footsteps can become tantamount to morality,
And our flight a recapitulation of the holiest sin