3 Poems

In the long beginning, when the Earth still tasted sweet, when birdsong vermilion and bluer-than-blue

was visible over flowers, when trees conversed with strangers, we wandered unafraid;-- until the first

stirrings of those besotted with wounds, with shattered things and dust / whispering, whispering / odd

songs of subdued but slowly blistering thoughts, glossy nettles leading to gripes, tormina, the false

Queen’s Yellow to scourge our bones, a contorted forging to remove from us all but the scoria of our

souls;--vaporous air, heavy with mercuried malice, exudation of a million saintless, pushing against our

lungs, yet still we breathe, ragged pneumatics, pulsing, through a trochar through our flesh, yet on we

breathe.

“Dreaming my way back to my childhood,

Long-forgotten images rattle my gray and astonished mind. […]

There sits the Sphinx by the fountain,

There opens the fig-tree into bloom,

There, behind that window, I dreamed my very first dream.”

—Adelbert von Chamisso, “The Boncourt Castle” (1827); translation by Daniel A. Rabuzzi.

Home is not a place,

It’s a breaching, a breathing, a ghost

Prismatic, asymptotic,

Always

Around a corner

In a courtyard of lost grace and fading.

Home is a journey, the journey,

No tickets, no schedules, stations obscured,

Oneiric, charismatic,

Always

Behind failed glass and warping.

Home is the Sphinx with her questions,

Fluid, ominous, lean (leaning),

Speaking at once four languages

On the borders of worlds past.

Respond,

Placate, assure (indexical)

Do not resist the joy

Of communion,

That is home.

That is home.

The sorcerers sing words of charcoal,

Weird-women weave spells of night,

Requesting of the dark,

For aid petitioning,

To etch love and meaning with ebony

Into the heedless white,

Into the cold white shorelessness,

Drawing from the warm wine-darkness

For succor, for celebration,

For songs to unstitch a shroud.