seven islands of devotion

Ca/Mg

The rocks of Albion press gentlyUpon my most remote bone fragments,In loving tribute to the meaninglessness of loyalty.I am an alkaline fossil in the limestone of Dover.In some geo-polymer-nonsense context,All I can do tonight is luv in trackless, lachrymose flight.
I Am the rocks of Albion.  Some Jesus told me, reluctantly,Reluctant of all the world’s misplaced treasures,In petra-coital wonderment,Of true reversement – of parallel space.

Arriving Only Now

Arriving only now,
After your harrowing journey,
Across galaxies of misunderstandings,
Pinkish afterlight, a star
That exploded five eons ago.


Behold. Light from a non-existent source.


Day is the jaundiced afterlight
Of the non-existent night, and
Night is the space
Inside the open arms of a lover
With amnesia.


Arriving only now,
This love as the crystal afterlight
Of ineffable surrections.
May this now, above all radiants,
Be a holding of release.

The Lovers

Look at those cranes in their wide arc!

The clouds they have with them
were with them when first they flew
from one life to another.

At the same height and same speed
they seem entrained entirely side-by-side,
as so shared of gorgeous sky,
both crane and cloud through which so briefly fly.

That neither one of them be lagged behind,
but see wind as nothing but their swaying,
which in touching both, cradling the other,
each-to-each now feels as they lie in flight together.

May thus the wind abduct them to the void.
So long as they remain alive, together as themselves,
that long there’s nothing that can touch them,
that long they can be chased from any place
where rainfall threatens or where shots ring out.

Beneath the varied discs of sun and moon
they will fly on, fallen wholly in thrall to one another.
Where to, you two? “Nowhere.”
Away from whom? “From all.”

You ask, how long they’ve been together? Briefly.
And when is it that they’ll part? Soon.
Lovers thus suppose that love supports them.

Of the Drowned Girl

 

1

When she drowned, and swam down

From the streams into the great rivers,

The opal sky shone wondrously

As if it had to calm the corpse.

2

Wrack and algae clung to her

So that she slowly became much heavier.

Coolly the fish swam around her leg,

Plants and animals burdening even her last journey.

3

And the sky in the evening became dark smoke

And at night held the light in balance with the stars.

But in the morning it grew lighter so that

There would still be morning and evening for her.

4

When her pale body had decayed in the water

It happened (very slowly) that God gradually forgot her,

First her face, then her hands, and right at the end, her hair.

Then she became carrion in rivers of much carrion.

--Bertolt Brecht

Musandam

O, glowing soul of Oman (updated)
your gameless hand reminds me
of a tattered Tilton prayer-cloth.
Why are you at war with entropy?


Don't you know the blood of angels
flows out into the Strait of Hormuz?
Do you really think the gauge
of ring (that pierces Gaia's nipple)
makes the slightest bit of difference?

Alex Tried to Drink New Amsterdam

Alex tried to drink New Amsterdam but
the streets were paved with broken glass,
but the buildings were made of sea-foam,
hyacinth and peacock feathers.

But shy and bleeding, she inquired about me
among those streets but had to learn to speak rudimentary peacock.

Seeming liquid green nepenthe,
nouns and broken glass constrained her.
But mostly verbs were not a problem
because there is but one in peacock
(and it can’t be conjugated).

Said verb is transitive but said,
by simply, keeping, surprisingly, quiet.