Dragonfly: Edmund’s Snaketail
This species is currently known only from six counties . . .
It was thought extinct in the 1970s and 1980s . . . .
– Giff Beaton
You wing to perch in the tree’s crown,
to still as jeweled yellow-green.
Your wings are panes overlooking
current’s clear and tireless pouring.
Through spring into the summer’s onset,
you haunt greens’ spectrum of woods
leveling to foothill’s chill seams
riffling over erosions of rocks.
River’s shallows ripple through rocks
for you to claim, to scud patrolling
your glinting stint of territory.
Mosquitoes’ plague and fate of flies,
your hunger scans through leaves.
Your globes of eyes veer out from eras
of genes’ lines past your reckoning,
launching the rush of flight to the kill.
An arrow’s shaft, you fly to hunt
the targets of your four wings’ course.
A phallic shaft in flight, you sheer
through air to wings arcing up
from rock’s island. You clinch her.
She arches her clubbed tail to you,
pair bending to one wheel of two of you.
You circle eggs shuddering from her,
not knowing a man’s name names you.
Among human numbers, you don’t know
the nearing of zero. Caught in sight,
your gleaming is beauty in sunlight
over waters where instincts know
streams, rocks and trees’ heights.
For now, April carries your rarity’s
facet of time you are. For now, you are
a jeweled valediction, a living brooch
you give to a branch, jewelling time.
Rising, Opening, Encompassing
The universe is the only text
without a context.
– Thomas Berry
Through different trees, wind becomes
different sounds.
The pines become the wind’s sound, here. I hear it.
Again the creek leads me along its seam,
from my name.
Its artery opens out from trees, to a heart of water.
No identity will be time-honored. It
will be time.
I feel mine. It is blood-honored. It is change-honored.
It is solitude’s language. It is
oblivious sunlight
falling over leaves. Their ancient need greened to feel it.
Monumental time pairs into wings,
flexing frail bones.
Wings open like meaning under meaningless sky.
Again geese lift from the pond I once
knew well.
Their wings beat. Their harsh calls tear at the air
of my rising. We rise on our wingthrusts
belonging
in our migration. In summoning’s wingwind, syllables
whisper through the rush of more
slurring syllables.
The lines of being recite themselves. The primal poem
scores the lines of flyways through
impulses born
knowing their courses, as creeks follow courses.
The one wing eclipsed the sky, wing of
millions
of wings, shadow’s thunder of pigeons flown
gone into change-honor, accepted by
change-honor.
The disembodying wind calls my embodied mind.
Time is the cadence falling. It falls
calmly as light
over leaves’ incarnation, carnage, reincarnation.
The pond is left as ripples stilling,
evaporating
from my knowing. My heartbeats count the tides
of blood’s migrations, pulses echoing out into older
iambics of nights beating into days, in the wordless odes.
Words of Time, Book of Fire
i. Riddle of Sun
Fat roots that fucked deep
will shrivel.
From drought’s
dry earth, tall weight will fall.
A pine’s risen branching’s
once-green, once-supple
needles will parch,
brown litter fallen to crumble
when touched.
Wings will find sky’s flyways
that upraised eyes might target
to recognize in passing
as a tanager’s red wings
will blaze, flickering from
another instinct-guided return
to April’s branch.
Like sea ice thawing, television glass
floats its dark surface
until a pushed button flashes it
into glimpses
of vistas of white
ice ridges crumbling
into slushy sea.
Through polar wastes, forests
rose then died and froze,
as they would rise again
in warming sunlight.
Glaciers bled their freshets
streaming
down from summits,
as they would bleed away again
in warming sunlight.
Ocean spilled over plains,
as waves would spill
again in warming sunlight.
Eyes will cut to follow then lose
red’s departing through green
flushing from branches’ seasons
of diurnal survival.
The blood-red feathers remember
through their color,
red’s memory veering as veins
into rivers, clearing to the air
of flyways’ courses.
Two wings will rise beating
among flocks of wings.
One by one, each caught in itself,
each bird flies
into instincts’ beckonings.
Skies of days revolve away
into night sky’s return,
horizon rounding
the width of a world,
measuring time’s hours.
A night’s clouds will clear
into the great distances
of the great night
always continuing
to spread, widening farther
into time’s sheer continuing.
The great night continues
to become itself,
to carry all spirals
of stars’ fire, of stardust,
of cyclopean clouds
and rubble.
The great night ferries
the drift of debris.
Great time is the chronicle
of the drift of debris.
In a forest’s night,
leaf embers rise to drift,
sparks widening
into wildfire widening
into becoming itself.
A wakening began
wakening itself toward more
than impulse, strangeness
opening through savannas
of strangeness,
spreading to seed
night’s continents with luminous
blooms of cities
and day’s tall stems of stacks
belching their blooms
of gray haze.
The gritty drift opens
as smoke rose hazing
from carnage’s campaigns,
demarcations of borders
lost in the flaming
of maps shriveling into embers,
each column climbing, billowing
mirrored in eyes
to blear after eyes
have shifted away,
smoke shredding into the sky
of clouds’ metamorphoses
and the sun.
ii. Riddle of Pages
Time opens its night
littered with
its phase of stars.
The book drifts open
forever hinging
toward forever’s
last chapter of embers.
The book of time slams open.
Sudden, blown pages
lash, whipping into blurring.
Coal-red wings of pages float.
Each page’s eon passes, flashing
as each wingbeat flashes, passing.
The book offers
its pages’ blank oblivions.
Each page accepts
a ledgered lettering.
Glimpsed mantra after mantra
inscribes itself, to shimmer
through pages’ charring.
Sutras smolder into smoke.
Each sky of each page darkens
shriveling into black,
receding beyond the words’
incandescent letters floating
into nights’ constellations.
The electric freshet blazes a way.
Dream-steps waken
into finding their way, following
the line of meaning’s swift,
luminous runnel.
The synaptic, coursing descent
radiant as lava
is the edge that guides
the footholds’ steep ascent.
The words speak themselves
as burning branches speak
their consumption, crackling
into recitation,
heard in illumination.
The oneiric gaze of upraised eyes
sweeps out through stars
to the farthest rondures
opening through all
of night’s eon-skull,
steps entering starless dark’s
void through rock’s skull
of a cavern’s cool,
sunless echo.
The ocher-painted walls
had been washed by torchlight
flickering through
skull-cradled thoughts.
A transformation persisted
winnowing itself
perpetually provisional
into swarming thoughts’ feverish
flaming of naming.
A going was guiding itself
climbing somewhere
swept with glimpses
of a vista’s distances
flickering through cloudcover’s rifts.
Up through itself,
scouting beyond itself,
a going would scale
clinging to a cliff face
up through itself, to debouch
beyond itself.
Mind would ascend
a mountain it would begin to feel
itself becoming,
maps of rivers
cascading, sparkling into rivers.
To emerge from time
to see through time –
through mind, to see –
red fire floating
in its bloating glare,
senescent sun oblivious
of oceans steamed away
from arid beds’ horizons.
To emerge from time,
to peer out through time –
brief minds would come to see
out through years counted
by a few sun-tethered worlds’
billioning circles, finally to wheel
through fire’s expansion,
worlds scattering as cinders’ flocks.
The turning page withers, collapsing.
The page crumbles
into ashes of archives’
measured and studied astronomies.
Smoke’s rise undulates, scroll
snaking in wind.
Smoke chronicles a pyre billowing
into dying away
beyond the long reign
of bacteria swarming
and churning
into joining and becoming
the burning.
Sun will consume stones
imprinted with what were once
wind-stirred fronds
and pinecones scattered
on ancient sun-dappled ground.
Sun’s lucence will consume
remnant stones shaped
from the shifting guises that flickered
to shards of hungering, searching
ape-shapes and man-shapes
sunken, locked under deepening
earth’s layers and weather’s
vagaries of ages
of ice, lightning and baking drought.
Mind would come to see the sun
floating in its laws.
Mind would come to see clouds ruled
by sky’s intricate laws.
The littered letters
brand themselves into the pages
hissing words
smoking into disappearing.
There in the page, a mantra
is another spring migration
of a tanager
glinting to a branch.
There, winter forgets itself
through ice cliffs collapsing.
There, a sutra is sun’s
glimmer over a river
of traffic inching over miles
of a highway’s baking asphalt.
iii. Riddle of a World
Empty cavern of a skull
had held a night of bison running
across cavern walls,
all held deep
in unheld night.
Some fragments will be dug
and lifted into sunlight,
carefully brushed
of earth and numbered.
Other rubble will remain
incarnations gone, like memories
unrecoverable through layers
lost in layers.
Parchment chars.
Smoke rises washing
into eddies, as waters eddy.
Rivers know nothing
of lives ending on banks
declared to be borders.
Maps’ paper yellows.
Maps metastasize,
browning into blotches
knowing nothing
of ink’s delineations.
A river’s rush fights
its war against rocks,
until carving its strength
as a hill’s arid scar.
Drought abrades green
scoured into sand.
Rivers offer their waters
to the conquering sun.
The photograph holds
a monk in last gesture,
cross-legged on asphalt
in the orange of a robe,
in the orange of gasoline’s
aura of flames.
The moments gleam
through an image past pain
of one life’s sum
in fire’s orange lens.
Flames’ sinews ripple.
Sparked pistons slam.
Asphalt’s scroll spills
toward desert’s sinking sun.
A human skull hovers
in flames. It floats
in sunburned skin
of bicep’s ink,
leather-chapped thighs
hugging gas tank’s
paint-sprayed slash
of meteoric flames.
Circle mirrors circle.
Vortex twins vortex.
The two tires blur
locked in chassis.
The two wheels whirl
caught as in curse
of pursuit.
Caught in one course,
one wheel races never
to catch the other,
as one wheel will never
evade the other.
They pass roaring
toward somewhere.
Unearthed, ore’s fierce
incandescence pooled
cupped in cauldrons
to be poured and forged.
Steel wheels clattered
down steel tracks,
steel car following steel car
heaped, trailing windrush’s
wake of black dust
to snake across plains
under night skies’ drifts
of cauls of clouds
eclipsing constellations.
Unremembered forests
darkened into ore,
finally torn from mountains’
soil renamed overburden,
to be reborn in fire.
Pines sun-hungered
to open into themselves.
Like messengers, pines
stood in their waiting.
Finally, a time ripened
into a choosing of time –
time of the possible
times that might be chosen.
Sun-summoned beauty hungered
to become itself.
Pines climbed, sun-sung paeans.
Out from the smoke
of the burning page –
Out from great time’s drift –
Out from all of blind time,
first eyes budded
to later mind opening
into a time for seeing
sunfall’s world –
to see it – to know it –
to be it – to keep it –
until voices within voices
finally ripple through flocks
departing through sky –
voices of messengers.
Blowing through sky,
a hiving of words
will whine away, farther
from words
forgetting words − I plucked
the
gleaming apple
from a branch –
The page wilts, warping
the imprinted words
of the ineffable fable –
then
I saw the branch
struck brittle
as
the tree of knowledge
creaked and cracked
in sunglare as it fell –
The scattering of words
will flock as birds chattering
into the mute distances.
Mosquitoes’ swarms will whine
lassoing into wind-whine’s
swarms of sand
calming to pages’ ashes
drifting down.
iv. Riddle of Sparks
Foreheads raised
in Wednesday’s rite
will wear the black of ashes.
Voices will take flight
choiring within walls
lifting windows’
sun-brightened spectrums.
Panes’ puzzle pieces join.
They glow, coloring
the numinous scenes
of a savior’s sacrificial life
and of a mute angelic visitant
hovering on wings −
sun’s illuminated world
eclipsed past colored glass.
In dusk, the spectrum dims.
A book’s black and red
scriptures imprint the white
of pages’ allegories
of the good and of
the eclipsing of the good.
Seed heads rose
to sway in wind
through fallen columns
of gods’ ruined temples.
Color of blood, like drops
fallen in sun-warmed grasses,
would open into blooms’ red
of ratany, cardinal flower,
bee balm, crimson clover.
A pulse will throb. It will repeat
through a wrist’s red warmth
of blood’s passing.
Being’s mantra will repeat.
The mantra of being’s
question will echo,
echo’s repetitions dwindling,
dimming as words’
black ink sinks
into a page’s black charring –
what lived as you?
what lived as you?
Hand will let go of hand.
Form will depart from form,
the ashes of permanence
floating through aftermath.
The great book’s pages
will shrink away to sparks
showering through darkness,
darkening into darkness.
It will burn away.
It will be the teeming
phase of stars
entering the end of stars
cooling and crumbling.
Beyond time’s youth
of the great, bright spirals,
residue will float, unraveled.
Darkness into darkness,
atoms will flock away
into separating.
Atoms will drift farther
from other atoms,
detritus parting
in unfelt cold
of the ultimate night −
of the conquering night –
v. Riddle of Moments
Viridescence opened
promising all leaves
into opening.
Time summoned
in a moment in the sheen
of a temperate sun,
into the feeling of days
becoming themselves.
In all of great time,
the self would cobble
its redoubt of selfhood
at its decades’ borders.
A line crosses an empty field
of the white of a page,
line of words extending into words,
line of sky’s invisible flyway
wings follow into exodus,
line following into generations
following into generations,
line of viridescence
becoming all leaves
ever to open.
Meaning’s mantras would quiet
until silent as ashes floating.
In the page
of the ineffable fable,
two wings return in spring
through flocks of wings,
sunlight warming morning air
to sift through leaves,
aeolian breath whispering
of the scattered triumphs –
to see it – to be it –
Oblivious sunlight
reached down from sky, bestowing
what would become
the verities
of viridescence –
to live as you –
to have lived as you –
What comes to appear, seeming
the good or the true –
what comes to seem to be
meaning and meant –
whispers, trailing into rustling
aeolian through a life.
The lived decades might find
the invisible flyway
through the verities.
A year follows years’ flyway
circling sun’s radiance.
Borne by, born into
great, oblivious time,
the moments open
into becoming themselves.
Feeling might find the flyway
through the moments
of the meant.