Glances towards the periphery,
allowed in a fleeting moment’s
coolly lustful indiscretion,
yield the sort of haul
that fills an empty
subway-car’s lack.

Echoes of realms without function,
our separate bildungsromane,
neuter any hope of language
in those long, high rides
as it is below:
anagogy.

There is a lot that is still said
by lovers across distant seas
and by silent strangers on trains.

These messages wait
in the pink mailbox
of after-death.

Every open window,
every fantastic vista
in that celestial journey
is life reflected:
a chance to peruse
all that we wrote.

Watch their steps:

rubied orphans, daily hoisting
the neon rafters of future
existence, and see them nightly
melt their worlds down to personal
scenes and fears.

When you look,
you will be studying yourself,
including the self studying,
and you will soon grasp for something,
an unbroken chain you can cite
to explain.

All around –
in the books that speak its hinges,
the purple braids of longue duree,
the tapestries of inner selves –
history (or its siren song)
perseveres.

What is it
that we need, or need to assuage?
Even now I tumble away
to look for the core of the core,
to charge myself to find the root
of my charge.

Whose logic
showed the outer bound of logic?
Who penned the words that slew language,
or endeavored to end desire,
or crowned the last king, who saw fit
to step down?

Are the tools with perfect edges — capable
of dissembling and revealing
the silk truth of explanation —
truly the very ones that built
this great hall?

Here and now
(the king has left, and his orphans
scurry along remaining braids,
fastening beams to each other
in vulgar truth-facsimiles)
is purple;

one purple, a moment’s specificity,
the indivisible atom
of braided time’s accrued purple,
the only color whose shades are
infinite.

Just a plane –
the paper-thin conic section
that cuts through the width of the braid –
houses the whole height of the thought
that seeks to trace the braid’s twisting,
trace itself.

Everything
that precedes it is pluperfect
yet still demonstrably extant
in the life of the thought itself,
in the structures of the moment
that it walks.

Purposing
the thought to itself, desire
to the desire that birthed it:

these are the mythic devourings
of history in service of
other hues.

Becoming

the master of explanation,
submitting to self-dissection,
knowing the total of a chain:
splitting your mind from the braid is
death-in-life.

Bound stillness,
captured result:

the chronology of creation
reflects a megastructure built to harvest
a dying idea in supernova.

The architecture of the mind
is a cemetery city,
the tombs of themes and progressions nailed
into place —

in closure, in artifice.

The Crystal Palace,
the Ebony Obelisk —

even the central stillness
of all motion,
the necessary null of the sum of all vectors,
is marked by a sturdy torii
at the end of the heart of the universe.

In this way, the border of desire
is dotted with marvel:
at the terminus
of every lost fantasy,
a regal station stands against the pink of twilight
with declarative colonnades:

the end of an idea,
absence made present.
The soaring atria of the possibilities therein
are painted blue.

The mind – the child –
coos a lullaby,
constantly rocking itself to sleep,

every oscillation betwixt
troubling narrows and peaceful still
placing a growing layer,
soil or scar,
between the wandering core
and the cold cosmos.

Is every night’s
reconciliation of dream and reality
an imagination tamed
and a toll thereon?

Certainly, that range
was ever tented
by the eternal tectonics
of desire and its lived border —

but does some force of maturation
burn a scrap of our sense of the world
so that we can warm ourselves at the flame?


Is a modernity —
of mankind, of a man —
a liminality?

Are there treasures
that rival the raw and majestic facts
of existence
in the rarified aether
of the world imagined?

I swear I have seen them:
blue and pink receding
mirages in fog.

Every citizen is assembled:


the emerald new-and-old
of prim-preened grass
and jowled, rotting dock timber,
the retired pontoon boat
with browning seats,
the brontosaural crane
rising up to bray before
the gabled, sleeping church —

all things line up
in the antechamber
of the waiting day,
queuing for their appointed rendezvous
with the wave of rays
that will curl and break
the horizon to find
their rank of heads.  

Each incremental longitude
is thus joined in choral file,
ringing in daily round,
receptors of the big grapes and psalms
that pass through the cornflower arcane
and into the book of life —

yellowed passages
in the Isabelline light
of the living day.

Let pass –
into the pages
of an endless mallow record –

the question of my true feeling,
the real barometer of identity
that comes with the
endorsement of desire.

Let rage
the business of
judges,

the wailers at my death,
the rabbi at the Autumn of man,

who may read me my sum of choices
from all the dusty files within.


I will not suffer to return from that shore
bridled with the full-black of Lethe,

the judges may place a red image
on my tomb.

All I would hope
to know –
in proud hope, or
romantic indulgence –

is whether any evening mirages,
shining pink now in
the highland pagodas
of after-death,

played upon
your observant eyes
with the glimmer
I saw when the corner-light
of Sunday morning cut a chord
through your averted gaze.

Into a cloak of yellow-gray
Dawn was taken by the day,
her rosy tendrils probing clouds
until her embers petered out.


His clouded face in the perfect wake
of fires August tends and makes
seemed to survey the scorched land
from atop his magisterial stand.


This stranger-day, with judge’s eyes,
could see inside my waking mind,
and knew at once my misery,
suspended in soliloquy.


My burning-skillet stream of thought
was turning, spurred at every pop,
towards the cloak of yellow-gray
and the day above my windowpane.


Ghastly comfort! To realize he knew
every red-eared shame + desire blue —
whether or not his stay be kind,
to have a guest, to share my mind.


Can reflection save an errant soul?
Does it quench or stoke the coals
to rummage through your attic’s dark
and reconstruct a mind and heart?


The cloak that fell about the day
reached to me as if to say
that every introspective thought
threads a gold through charcoal cloth.

Black pitch tends to reveal in the way that
all artifice is purposed to conceal;
in the sealing-in of roofs and ceilings,
the shapes of edges and cornered Truth.

The utility of the space within
is shadow noise, manifest absences,
blue futures modeled in cubist blueprint,
provisions for happiness yet to come.

How strange the visage of brash Nature then,
when it crawls the alien trellises
of structured cities, itself becoming
the echoes of the edges it subsumes.

The strident life of squirrels and tan sparrows,
claiming corners unfinished or broken,
as if to call the whole era of man
a season they expected and welcomed,

seems a just reproach not to presumption
but the execution of the edges,
pointing out each flaw in that noble dream
like water’s path through the cracks in the pitch.

Living in the absences left to us —
turning beyond the shapes of history —
does not the past guide every step down
the braids that trail from its broken corners?

The day is frozen
underneath its gray roof –
the absence of the sun
and the anticipation of
its measure

gives way to glacial time,
marked by the intervals of a crow’s caw

and the eras of
the inward eye.


Noise – the chattering
permutations of
multiplying ripples,
the interlocking periods
of cricket calls,

and now cicadas –

loses its rhythm,
adds a new
nothingness to its shell,
turns its face
from the human lens,
goes back to sleep
as unpatterned data.


The still grey light is
suspended in mid-air;
the clouds catch their hue
of the rocks that menace them;
the crow fixes its nest
in the absence of shadow.

Streaks of every blue
are running through the first intimations of an
early August afternoon;

rapturous Sunday, unerring as it pulls us
from ourselves, as it does,
each time, from time.

The mercurial blue,
not of Sunday but of
some larger time,
conspires to show me
a vision upon its shifting canvas
and pull me again from
the vibrant day to
a melancholic blue.

Reflected in its turning surfaces,
or perhaps shimmering a measure below them –

blue alone can drive me to madness
with visions of joy,
of tantalizing futures
made sweet and impossible
by the mysteries of blue.


Armed as I am in
olive’s chain-link sorrow
and the Olympian regalia
of Sunday-time, I smile
at the blue, as if
I knew these lies like
those of a trickster friend,
as if I were old as
blue itself on ageless Sunday,
and affixed that streaked veil in my mind:

“Your visions of happiness
are deep and beautiful,
but they are not
my own.”