Perception Archives

Among Kings and Queens

Along the fortress walls

The game prize glowed with standard marble and a cartoon cupid peeped out to double the flames. An abundance of jewels decorated the assembly, the idea to catch more light, and more, to rise and rise to meet its source.

It is not difficult to make a fetish of fearing dark, where those uncrowned and slippery forms tend to wind along walls as if to challenge their veracity, as if to challenge certain given truths, the self-evidence of status. Or of your life.

That you see and know. That you remember what was. That what now shall be done is your will. That time is for your hurry, food for your teeth, your tongue, that these pills will do for fixing what ailments may come. That the night you feared might only be good where you wished it so when you went around saying good night and watching the walls.

Wash

Up and out

Just beyond the cliffs where once we looked out, yearning to know it all, now the head flowers a cloud of dandelion-white, prepared to scatter at a breath over sands into the next tide.

Stills

Dream imprints

Mornings, I wear a dream veil
to blanket the known tracks
in fresh snow, melting them
back into unknowns.

Cake

Mouth after the tail of itself––to eat it, too.

Even amid the abundance of that offering, you were distracted by that incessant worry over the stability of your reflection in the glass, thinking that perhaps you could not steal enough to compensate for the original trespass, and it is true, after all, that some suspicions, nursed long enough on themselves, can only find their error by proving themselves correct.

Glare

Right here, overseas.

Against the weaponed horizon of that giant’s resolution and a terror so common as to be de-barbed by dailiness, one may wonder, what dwelling is this? Cushioned cradle that may spring in the next breath catapulting some feeble syllables of the last exhalation on an often named but never understood strangeness into the end of history. But it never had a mirror or a bare face, did it? We knew it only ever by its masks. Which one is this?

Skull Talk

And hearing range.

I know, love. The anxieties are legion.
But for now, I would like if you could
return to me the absence of my face
from where you’ve been hanging
these ghosts on its edges like
draperies to keep out the draft.

I rather like the velocity of that chill.
I have other uses for these bones.
I want to feel the air run through them.

It is something else, the air.
But that word is the custom
in this place.

I try using terms you know
––air, face, bones––
because the rest will not

translate.

Goldfish

Bagged at the county fair

Given enough practice
a body can learn
to go missing
to protect the parts
always invisible
that have survived
the stabbing attentions
of being anybody’s prize.

Trembling

Pulse

The small trembles before the great, a learned response, essential for survival. What happens when the small is so puffed up with the air of his own invention that he forgets trembling, dismissing all capacity for awe of anything beyond his mirror?

See

Beyond sight

O weak faith,
what do you call
this, then––?
crowding the air
with those eyes?

Shoreline Notes

On nearness

I kept meaning to see it, and the intention throbbed like impending heartbreak. To chronicle the residents, for example, of a hot afternoon lakeshore: the stained-glass wings of dragonfly in cattail, then open space, beach-like; blankets, sunbathers. Where a child laughs, running, and the rooftops beyond the green with gulls above these and the trees and how peace is the word of the day, so peaceful, the sunbathers say. You cannot see the killings from here. Or how somewhere an old soul is returning and a new one, not yet known in this place, is being born, formed like a new star from the compression of elements over time. And of compassion, that ache of the imagination. And the nearness of death and our proximities to one another in the face of an unnamed annihilation, and of this we know nothing so go on remembering––to a point. These layers of time assembled and striated on our shelves, against nature which prefers the susurrations of breath and heartbeat, waves––those notes that only come in wholes. Now the ritual. Bread, wine, hands. Forgive me sister, stranger, friend. Forgive me, child, for I know not what I am beyond that glass. So I stare into it in this silence, trying to sing.