...here, once again, at
year’s end, you rendezvous with
fracture, severance, with
those signs that, vehement,
lead —ineluctably— onto
the
flaccid landscapes of their
own
dis-
solution.
the very
spaces we’d peopled, once, with seraphs and dragons, with fork-
tailed water nymphs, in default of which a silent hysteria
had all too insidiously arisen.
eliminating,
as it did, the very mechanisms of attribution.
(inference,
now, confined to the inferrer; desire to each of its disassociated
parts).
wherein,
once, had fabricated wings.
elaborating,
as we had, a space every bit as imperative as it was, by nature,
illusory.
for ‘here,’
heavy with foliage, with the wild dicing of our own exhausted
syllables, was never more than what the breath –the breeze, that
is, within the iris of the breath— had transfigured
into the
first tenuous outlines of an irrecusable ‘there.’
—of those
hallucinatory residues: the hard mirage—
wherein were.
wherein was.
wrapped, that
is, all muscle and murmur, about the rippling screens of the wasn’t.
unto the
nothing —sumptuous—foresworn.
enveloped,
enshrined, but only for the length of our own tenuous
spellings.
...otherwise, but a
squabble of bluejays in the
black,
wind-
struck orchards, but the
shatter, the
spillage, the unremitting
dismemberment of each
diaphanous
facet.
was only in
the ruins, occasionally, that you’d awakened.
Only there,
in enumerating artifact, cataloging all that auroral debris, that
you’d intuited —your ankles jingling with shadow—the first
stuttered increments of passage.
wresting out
of the forgotten the yet inexpressible.
real as
leaves and every bit as evanescent as whispers, what —at last—
might track intention: everything, that is, that’s ultimately meant.
darker towards dawn, the
page, that
very moment, is nothing less
than the face’s first
hesitant apparition, its
vaporous mask, gradually, filling
with
feature. for whatever
speaks, finally, trans-
figures. fortuitously
struck, the
note opens on
the
deep corolla of a mouth, and
the mouth, on the
roundness of
its own
in-
cipient response.
