Arcana
- The Wind’s Will
The solvent alters. The durable
Erodes and is transformed.
A weathervane does not challenge
But gives into the wind. Its function
Is to make visible the wind’s will.
The moon sheds jade:
A held breath released.
- Alchemical Mutability
Two images set upon one another—
The overlay of a double exposure—
Defy the time that distinguishes them.
Matter’s alchemical mutability
Calls for the suspension of disbelief.
One sings little song to summon
One’s ancestors, whose faces are painted red,
A red derived from insects that eat only prickly pears.
- A Lack of Knowledge
When one gets close enough
To see, the mirror fogs over.
A constellation of small stitches.
Mud flats submerged in brackish water.
One speculates with a lack of knowledge.
Ambivalence eludes categorization,
The dull hum of the humdrum.
- An Endless Storm
The distance between a thing and its name:
A waste land, an anarchy, a maelstrom,
A fictive space, an endless storm on Jupiter.
What are one’s poems about? About how one
Thinks in language, how language gets in the way of thinking.
How one fails to acknowledge the bitterness of beauty:
Its uncorrupted substance, its quintessence,
The uneasy scribbles like hesitation marks.
- At a Remove
An object displaced to a vitrine
Is renamed, recontextualized.
Asked to reweave a spider’s web,
One constructs a tiny loom,
Spins dust and mist into thread.
One works at a remove as if one’s life
Were a novel. No, a novella. No, a short story.
- A Ruined Mansion
Not a blank notebook but a book of tears:
Each page rumpled where wet,
Watermarked, fragile, see-through-able.
A pencil stub trips along, traces a future.
The fixed compass point is the present.
Behold a ruined mansion lit from within,
Aglow! Who now is the descendent
And who the predecessor?
- Contrary Pleasures
A ruin houses earlier ruins.
Among these ruins, one tallies
The ambiguities, their variety.
One recounts the contrary pleasures
Of lighting and snuffing a candle.
One brings a covered dish,
Asks to ride shotgun,
Complains about the tyranny of taxonomy.
- As If a Demiurge
The lapses of time that are ritual
And ceremony exhaust that time.
One builds with language something
That resembles the resemblance
Of something. As if a demiurge
One says the world into being.
And said, is. Or at least, is said.
- The Water’s Patience
One is working on patience
And can claim to possess
The patience of a cicada.
But one envies the water’s patience.
Its mutability, its flexibility,
As it shapeshifts from vapor to solidity,
As it makes of rock a canyon’s depth,
As it tops the canyon with spires and spindles
- The Onslaught
The room, empty, says little
About the lodger displaced.
Forgetting is, if nothing else, a filter,
A barrier by which the onslaught is delayed.
The holdall, left behind, holds little.
As if a weather balloon descended,
A small gray cloud fills in the clearing.
