Tag: lens

What Passes

Still life with axial shift.

Something low and lithe creeps around the edges of a dream that has me pushing hands away so I can get my face into breathable air. A passing thing, it leaves the lasting mark of its metaphor, this lens. It won’t be replaced. Like that, the body told back to its life, her silenced hunger now a howl. What blessing can hold at a table like this, quaking above the groan of this rumbling earth? One of us notices. The other is primed to accept whatever comes as naturally granted, another gift for losing before it is opened. There is no sense to what is shown with no figuring and nothing to explain. Nothing, I will say, if anyone asks. Go back to sleep.

Holler

From an undersea expanse.

It started above ground. Then we

worked the present’s peace, as

the storm and life went on until

the whole story was underwater.

The lens moved to track the current,

the coral, its choral lives. The lens

was intelligent. It saw us. We

looked back, our entire lives

before us, now beyond speech,

the brave vessels of our knocking

hearts still moving by the word. 

We held new names inside us,

hinting at what we were and to

what we were being returned. 

Down we went. At last, 

there was no time before this

but our remembrance, and some

would make trespass of memory

holding it close, would hear its

first utterance in the water, like

Mother            even now, in

this constant dusk the day 

still breaking in my––– 

But she said:

                        Hush,

don’t speak to me of

souls. Not here, at this

late hour. Only hold.

Behind the Curve

At the bottom of the lens.

Where is the story to account for waves of squirrel over branch, or this ache reminding there is no way sometimes it seems to reckon with (to recognize?) the way things are and when the fall and the hawk and the fire­­­–––? 

No. Look. Stop this. 

I am looking. It’s the seeing that won’t come. I remember when sight was like a vision, the undulating body of it, ripe with equal parts recognition and want. Now this spinning, keeping watch, shapeshifting dark. It knows me. But I want to remember the other one. Who laughed and meant it.