Quelle II

The Valencia orange hangs
on Celan’s line,
swelling
his syntax
into its own myth
until it falls,
sweetly
onto wet clay,
which whirls
on wheels,
descending
to an emotion.

Quelle

Silence
and sentence,
twin snakes,
enwrapped
and ensorcelled
by Jacobs’ staff.

Quicksilver

We grind cinnabar
and sparks
scatter from the lathe.
We slit the snakeskin
and lubricate the dragon scales,
their bright moistness
harbingers
a spring space
of late containment.

Lichtung II

The primordial word
springs from a stone well,
dug by a grandfather
with an iron shovel,
seeking syntax.
It bubbles forth myth
and flirts with thought’s force,
which could be order
or fascistic desire.
Unlike Leni’s portraits
of youth’s beauty
or some metaphysician’s
game of goose stepping
rhyme and metronomic feet,
the sentence
must find
its own meadow
or clearing
within the black forest.

Visita

I was born
under the sign of the Lion
and by all reports
I should have followed the Sun King
but on the cusp
I slipped from the curb
and twisted through my fall
into the crow caverns
of the Moon Queen.
I lay in her sweet arms
for a decade,
listening to the foot pad
of the blue dragon,
fearing what I would become.
When a child
I sat with my father
in an old theater
on the square
and cheered Errol Flynn,
the greatest puer,
charge down Red Mountain.
As a man,
I channel the Hunger Artist
and intuit-
Kavka means jackdaw.

Couple

After chaos expelled them,
she contained him,
absorbing his anxiety,
madness and aloneness.
He reciprocated
by constructing a home
in a cave,
carrying a sharpen spear,
its tip hardened
in stolen fire,
and hunting black bison.
In the age of order,
they stand alone,
uncontained,
twitching
from a palsy
of self involvement
and modernity.

Electronic Age

Before connectivity
he secured
his yellow claws
in the center
of the ice.
Now,
the floe
melts
and the seals
disappear.
To be alone
in frigid silence
was paradise.

Verwandlung

In the center
he smeared
his body
with black mud
to protect
against flies
and the sun.
He floated
neither up
nor down
in the slough,
praying for metamorphosis.

Foucault's Pendulum

The rule of one
breaks many.
Chaos mourns the alone,
as its priests plot
against Akhenaten
the hermaphrodite.
The one
now dead
becomes many
until he slithers
from the silence,
stuttering
sibilant sounds
to his staff.

Austria 1782

With a black line,
sharp as a Cossack’s sword,
the bureaucrat
scratched him
from the Levant.
A raven
pecked
his brown eyes
in a dream,
birthing
Raben,
his second self.

55

Journeying north
he turns right.
The mystery
yields left
toward resistance.
The gauche
usurped
steal a march
through the strait
gate.