Dust Before Dawn

In low light.

I walk between these low lamps as you sleep, the poorwill’s circled notes outside, inviting recollection of endings that preceded this one, and the sound of this space is a single note, sustained in the once noble ruins of this ribbed house of song and sacrament. The stained glass windows that once made a miracle of your face are now clotted with the dust of a decade of storms, and it may be true that there is never time to clean them, but also that I fear the glass has worn to the point that only the dust holds it here, or perhaps that whoever this is, still waiting for the mass, will shatter if those beams should suddenly descend. Again.

The Seeing Eye

Reflecting pools of vision.

There is the seeing eye of the creature accustomed to being ruled by reflex. When it suddenly stops to look, the gaze seems to hold all in its trembling peace. It becomes like the lake, the eye of the landscape, by which the cosmos beholds itself.

***

Yet another passage inspired by (and with borrowed images from) Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space(“Intimate Immensity), a work so rich and layered, I learned to take only tiny sips at a time, as I do this morning.