sight Archives

& now this

yes, and. . . ?

how broken a body
must be from her remembered warmth
to find herself leaning in like this

what mouth so long
silenced learns to round the sound of her
lover’s name well enough to footprint the air

between them into shadow
lines suggestive of the mystery of why
it is so fraught to be a body here

longing in chorus
along ancient lines of undulating tones
over water, cavern, tundra, moor

into the next breath coming
to touch her with finally something
so long past the melt of seeming sure

into the hot mystery of skins
so sudden
& here

& hear
me now
i call you lover

come hurry
it is time now set me
as a seal upon

it all take it all
i give it up
to you know

say me back
or leave me
here

where matter
is what does not
beyond this place

where i
see you
seeing into here asking

where i
to respond
must grow limbs of song

to run
after the endings that come
and come upon us even now & i––

in this one day ever
hope to answer
my unutterable word

waste

an everyday tragedy

i watched the small gods of the would-be hero’s mirror world tie him down to be devoured. he took it for a feast in his honor.

terrified of being, he chained himself to the mountain he confused for his own image and became the vulture to eat his own flesh every night. he never thought to imagine a fire there for the taking. he had to see himself its maker. he had to steal.

he thought he was the sun and the rain, the harvest and the shade, but we knew him as the storm, and its wreck. when asked why, he said only “I….” and blew wind.

knowing was outside him, looking on, but knocked too soon. as often happens when a would be hearer lives in the maze of his mirror-world, the answer came too late.

A Delicate Imbalance

Appealing to vertigo

Begin again–– before the fall. Turning and returning––the mind spins like a child to feel the euphoria of dizziness. Too close to the edge, I try to warn, back away from there! But vertigo is its own draw. The weight of seeming sanity is enough to inspire a preference for the vantage afforded by dizziness. There is sight beyond seeing, but no words for what it is.

Echo

In an aftermath

Maybe what lasts after endings is this
wind as song stripped of technique
bells as sound of fallen leaves, light
a riot of color, firing life–––––––
and stars as receivers who curve
long necks of shine to hear each
prayer in context at a distance
to reveal how this planet for now
at any given moment still pulses
with these voices of us reminding
us please–– and dear–– and help––
beyond the beyonds of this all.

Matters

Of observational distance

What sees comes so close to the living that it is easily mistaken for an act of sight and who draws a line between one and one must break into endless pieces until the particles are fined to dust and oned again, the singular cloud approaching.

See

Beyond sight

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

Because Sight is Not Absolute

After Czeslaw Milosz

I was a sponge
suffering to behold
what I could not absorb.

Irrational Wish

For an opening

To want the eye
that sees where
I cannot enter
to blink from
this blind
impossibility.

Everywhere

And not a drop

And yet whole worlds
so close, postponed
by colliding logics,
opinions where sight
might be, to common
need. We could not
invent the water,
though some
tried.

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.