A landscape devoid of transparent eyeballs.
When did we all become photographers?
Freeze fleeting things,
filter clouds, endless beauty a simple effect.

Funny how enclosures feel obsolete—
the graves, the houses, three-sided mornings—
when I am a share, a like,
self-simulacrum selfie.
I stand on a fascinating algorithm,
Below that it’s reposts all the way down.

Share, share a like,
share a googol of happy lives
better than yours.

Are we saying yes  
to starting off yet again,
absent this time?

1
To suspend
A summer day in glass.
Complaisant green,
This blade of grass.

2
To give away
Grief, unfeel a caress,
Nourish a hunger
For emptiness.

3
To insinuate
to love’s unanswered skin
syllables of desire
pricking in.

4
To build
a terrace of form,
inside the weather of confusion,
a private storm.

5
To wander
through rooms of the mind
searching for enchanted objects.
What do I have to find?

6
To mark
against the slippage
of another year
that we are here.

Swarming:  bees above a skylight.
Breath forming:  a child asleep in fading light.

Innuendo:  eyes when a kiss ends.
Before crescendo:  the audience as the curtain descends.  

Age:  a handwritten journal from a wandering liar.
Exhausted rage: Slauson Avenue after the Rodney King fire.

Utility: a brown wooden desk with empty drawers.
Apostrophe: an oration delivered near crashing shores.

A life destroyed:  an Olympia typewriter covered since 1975.
The void: a poem read aloud, addressee not alive.

Mountains swell, knuckle, roll.
Foothills ***** and slide.
Canyons fold, streams bend,
Salt marshes wrinkle and sink.
These pagan forms alone gave shape  
To this valley before God’s people arrived.    

Not until the Saints brought  
Rectilinear rectitude
And wrote a grid into this arid soil
Did this place become the land of God.  

My parallel brethren,
North Temple, First South,
We will meet in eternity.

And now do I sustain the men
Who bear the Logos
From the mountain to the desert,
Past Saint and Mason, Catholic and Jew
And, unbending, reveal
That the straight line is an act of God.

©David Adamson 2015

Freely accepted, constraints that bind
The senses can free the mind.

And so I knelt before her latitude.
Her choker became the horizon,
The light from her eyes a silent beatitude.

“What do you feel?” asked the voice of the wind.
I tried to answer, lips rapt and spellbound,
Eyes questing, but made no sound.

Enlarged by desire, encircled by pain,
I felt the fire and the rain.

I watched the walls of the room
Dissolve into clouds
As a crack in the sky beckoned,
Opening wide.

I was pulled upward into a swelling storm
And watched all around as I climbed
A mirror world form,
Like the universe rhymed.

Then calm.  I found myself at a steely gate.
A sign read “The Labyrinth of Language.”
The path began straight
Then forked into uncountable branches.

Words took shape and tried to dance
But hung
Captive on my soundless tongue.
They have remained there ever since.

Free them, goddess,
Let these words find flight.
Take them from the shadow of my tongue.
Release them into your luminous night.

1.  Learn forgiveness.  Then withhold it from everyone.
2. Avoid making enemies. Leave it to your friends to find you insufferable.
3. There is good in everyone. The trick is not to let it out.
4. Expect the worst. You’ll be right.
5. Never hurt anyone’s feelings.  Unintentionally.
6. Command an audience.  Then who cares if you loathe mankind?
7. Self-sacrifice ennobles the spirit.  But someone still has to clean up the blood.
8. Don’t dance.  Then no one will watch.
9. Don’t envy others’ success.  Intervene more forcefully to prevent it.
10. Life is short, but otherwise lousy.

A butterfly landed nearby.
It had auburn wings
and azure circles on each,
like a pair of eyes
that looked through me.

“Butterfly, you are beautiful!” I cried.
“You give me pleasure.
I love you.”

“Love is a beautiful thing,” said the butterfly.
“I need food. You have flowers.
Can I drink from them?”

“Of course,” I said.  
“But aren’t you going to love me back?
I am a butterfly just like you.
Tell me that you see it!”

“Nothing that I say,”
she said, “can make you a butterfly.”
“If you want to be a butterfly,
be one.”

He sat in dewy grass
Writing a pastoral dialog.
“And death is also here,” mused he.
“All art depends on gravity.”
He neatly ordered his pages.

She wove lilacs in her hair,
Standing on moss in the damp morning air.

He considered that God might be in all things.
Was he blaspheming by crushing the grass?
But of course Bentham’s calculus obviates sin.
He thoughtfully scratched his chin.

She approached him from behind,
Dismayed by the clutch of wildflowers
Someone had wrenched out by the roots and thrown away,
Yet suffused in the absolute peace of that day.

She touched his arm—a summons.
What was that sensation?
He was left without rational explanation.

“Forgetting is the purest form of clarity.”
--Someone

And so ended the unquiet dreams
awkward reunions with the dead
wandering the halls of sleep,
the bodies of others’ loss.
Ghosts gone from the gazebo.
No laments in the lowering sun.

She woke. Blue sky blinked into her eyes.  
The room’s climate began to clear.
The familiar path from bed to door
curled into a stone staircase.
When did that get there?  
There was writing on the wall
near a waterfall.

She climbed. She soared.  
She leant a myth to god.
She stood in a garden with five black stones.
She foretold an eclipse,
Burned the witch of winter,
Stepped in the same river twice.

The moon shrank into the alarm clock’s face.
Her breath brewed clouds above her forehead.
She sat aloof in the empty air,
Alone in the immense morning,
At rest in clear, cold perfection.

The place smells the same. Garlic, undergraduate angst, oven flame.  The menu hasn’t changed. The Antony and Cleopatra.  Italian sausage and snake meat. The Macbeth. Cooked in a cauldron.  Blood sauce won’t wash off. The Julius Caesar.  Served bottom side up.  You have to knife it from the back. The Timon of Athens. Only bitter, separate ingredients, overcooked to black. The Frankenstein.  Assembled from ingredients at hand.  Served smoking from a jolt of high voltage. The Dramatic Irony. It’s a surprise.  Everyone at your table knows what you’re getting while you cover your eyes.

You said tragedy means playing out a ****** hand. The game has to end badly. Bigger Thomas. Joe Christmas.  Hamlet.  Everybody dies.  No choices. The end. I said, no, it means you have a fatal flaw.  Macbeth and Ted Kennedy—ruthless ambition.  Gatsby—pride. Lear—vanity. Richard Nixon—douchebaggery, deep-fried. Bad choices.  

“Can’t be both,” you said.  “One is character, the other one’s fate.” “What if character is fate?” I asked smugly. “Then we’re *******, Heraclitus. It’s late.”

I smoked a pipe.  You wore a beret and severely bobbed hair. I wrote sarcastic love letters to the universe. You wrote hate lyrics to Ted Hughes, love notes to Jane Eyre. We kept relations on an intellectual plane. You had a set of big firm ideas, dark-eyed principles, and a dimpled scorn of life’s surly crap. My eloquence was tall, square-jawed, curly, tan.  Together we solved the world’s big problems as only undergraduates can.

“Can pizza be tragic; or is it merely postponed farce?” I wondered. “Here it is clearly both, though not at the same time,” you said. “Does tragedy plus time equal comedy?” “Sounds right.” “No, tragedy plus time is any order in this place on a Saturday night.” After what seems like decades our orders finally arrive.  

“What did you get?” I asked.  “Looks like the Double Tragic,” you replied. “Flawed choices and fate. I leave you. You were unfaithful to every love sonnet you ever wrote.  Yet you are the first man who makes me feel loved, the only one who ever will.  I strain for that feeling again and again but it becomes a boulder that keeps rolling back down the hill. And fate—my beautiful ******* that got so much attention from men will **** me.  The only thing they will ever nurse is a cancerous seed. You?”

“The Too-Many-Choices, done to perfection. Choosing everything means choosing nothing. Loving too many women, I love none.  I follow a simple path home but try to stay lost. Living in the space between lost and found has a cost.  My life becomes a solitary pilgrimage to no place.”

“Let’s not reduce our lives to a Harry Chapin song,” we agreed. So we toasted the beauty of what never was. I went back to my hotel to write, found my way to a few easy truths, and called it a night.

In daylight he was a realist,
Anchored in a world of objects.
But under pale starlight,
Apparitions of her kisses
Danced across his skin

Desire for her, he told himself,
was a craving for form,
a way to fill the night
with soothing fiction.
But the truth was that he could no longer tell
love from addiction.

The others look at the ground.
They look at the sky.
They watch for a miracle,
Believing that they believe,
Wondering when they will no longer wonder,
Unthinkingly mouthing the New English Bible.

You ignore their designs.
You wait for the moment
When we will forget
The climate in our clothes
And the slaughter on our plates
And the tongues of our elders
And the mystery of what remains
And that light is our order,
Our kingdom is stone
And that love, envy, joy, despair
Are rituals that we cannot unlearn
As we touch and retreat in predictable ways.

The sun burns its vicious circle.
So you lie down to sleep.
You try to go to sleep.
You hope they remember to wake you.
But not too soon.
No, not too soon.

You can’t really picture the place.  
You don’t recall who was there.

But you remember surprise
That human ashes are not powdery dust,
Apt to disintegrate like snow,
Or soft like bread cast upon the waters.

Dad’s ashes chafed your palms like jagged seeds
As you clutched fistfuls from a plastic purple box
And flung them down a hillside
Somewhere in Little Cottonwood Canyon.

And you remember the feeling of urgency
As you retreated up the hill.
You had motions to go through,
Space to occupy,
A black and white landscape to walk
Among small figures filing along a dirt track
In the airless September heat.