Upon a web strung across vast fields of
pure and distant velvet nothing,
perfect back-traces of the flickering past
revolve in place, in silence,
signs puddled for an instant from abandoned
corners of clusters. Polaris sieves a movement,
severs Octantis in a slated blink of being as quiet
reaches from further clutches, as a light quivers against
the dark, enshrined in its own solace, drinking from
a garden of heaviness; a sigh slips, echoes and lingers.
A tidy emptiness wavers in the tide of
time-shifting constellations, pulses lost in the single
night that never stems. A fine dust propagates
under the breath-patterns of its own constituency.
No symbol spoken, the still moment reaches and
encompasses all, heaving in glass moments compressing
beneath layers, bathed ablaze and curling through its
own precessing maw. Gathering, spiralling pieces of
uncoalesced millenia hurtle against an again hurtling
arm of a freckle gathered on a point of dust drifting
between caverns diving through the weight of walls holding
all that support their standing. A drop of light quivers
from each mouth, hides in crevices where smaller droplets
stand firmer at each junction, stand shining quietly with
no motive, dials slipping. The dripping lays down sheets,
climbs no corridor, designs a movement of no consequence;
dries out, knowing full well all the while. A ghost remains,
or a breath, both ultimately of finite import:
an exhalation or mote of dust.
Rain won't fall, the creek remains and, in tumult etched of
rigid symmetries, forges splits in azure. A broken fullness,
a glimmering product to permute and dissipate repetitions,
the slow formation of a complete emptiness.
In fine tapestry woven through the murk bellowed, the pattern
twists, coiling fingers through itself, the coalescing rotations
play out silence in no coda. The creek was never there.
Rain makes its way.
Capsular soil gives, capitulates petrichor,
defies dust aridity to cling in soft bundles about the child,
clothed in broken wings, tail clambering, all fine splits decided
upon countless repetitions passed. Light hovers and lights stand,
spin, in turn, as intervals chew tails through no static
motif, each gesture a mockery of predecessing broken ground
as fingers sliver ever toward known constancy,
blankets of warmth, an unclosing eyelid. Thus shuffles
awake the clamberer, to stretch and arc against potentials,
to fluoresce and bathe in radiance. A greater scheme
mingles at the tips of outstretched arms carrying wings
to break and flesh to guide a canopied architecture into
clearings laid out below twinkling webs to fold through
and let breath be taken as pawprints slowly form the
fingertips of a new architect. The children of the
child watch silent as motion trickles from centuries'
fortune. An emblem hangs in soft light on a ripple over
all-but-still water, cohort as glittering fragments strewn
beside. A bird's cry is lost in the marsh.
Again,
moments of absolute movement lay out beds of stillness, of reprieve.
At sea level, the curling faultlines feed open plain from
glass tears and monuments fleck the landscape of horizon.
To a pivoting sequence carves tiny bound structures in
self-image, a boiled-down replication to forge immemorial
traverse, a hairline fracture led blind through lakes of ice.
Still, to carry forward in a display of conviction, fine
splitting lineage diverges and cross-pollinates. First a
step, then a meadow, a panorama, three scores of
underbrush, seven mountains cradling a single pass,
two endless expanses of peat, one river for the life
of a child, three nights of no sleep, a resolve,
six iterations, one modification, seventeen snowfalls,
one feat built slow to grandeur, three months at sea,
three years at sea, three thousand years, seven oceans,
four hundred billion innovations, a blink of an eye. From
closed wings rise ordered patterns to clamber, always
asleep, to punctuate that immutable grove of light now
organized in transient gleams of projection and
nomenclative claim. Hollowed bellies of these
unstirring colossi, in turn, self-assemble and
writhe against an upturned gradient: disorder
bares teeth, crafts homogeneity and stumbles
on as Polaris dutifully continues in slow march
and reclaim of a ghost still cycling and hiding.
Finally, the moment takes grasp of all else
and itself, and parts tides of now-distant lights
through the ceiling and collapses where, between
word-laden walls, a tiny and terrified piece of
it attempts to reveal to all else that the moment
is already
gone.
written for a reading; never read anyway.
11-12/03/14