The Geiger counter’s tick-tick like an old clock’s.
Foreign voices on the shortwave, static
Like a mother’s shush,
like crushed salt through a sieve.
The past waits unmoved:
a rusted wrecking ball
In a vacant lot: a scoured erratic
Set down by a glacier—out of place, useless.
A book of nuance that resists closure.
Book of Desire.
Book of the Vertigo of Desire.
Book in which the whole is latent in the partial.
Rooks roost in the quarry cliffs; goldfinches
Flit and dart. Water long concealed in shadowed cisterns
Takes on a ferrous edge.
Look, they said.
SPECULATION ON SUFFERING
On a Babylonian bas-relief,
An antelope fawn’s
Forelegs collapse;
Neck taut, it swings
Its head back
As a lion latches
Onto its hindquarters.
How stable a moment
Of suffering:
Fixed and fused to flesh,
The fold at the forward
Corner of the fawn’s eye
Giving in, it looks like,
To sleep, yet the eye
Is wide open,
Attentive, not resigned,
But fraught, fearful,
Consumed by seeing.
ORACLE BONES
Beyond the word-house and sky-hung mountain,
Rain-frayed light burnishes the dusk-edged hour.
One can read the tossed owl bones as empty-handed,
Meaning not yet or try again, can cast forth into a future,
A dust-narrative of loose snow.
Each is the same burden:
Not yet and try again—the lintel flame-licked,
Sleep banked in cold ash, a room furnished with smoke.
Each word on the page burned illegible.
But no matter, you know the story by heart.
SPECULATION ON A STAR-NURSERY
An empty, oarless
Boat drifts
Above vast depths,
Above silt
Stirred up like dust
In a star-nursery,
Where gravity
Long ago
Released light,
Light which has not
Reached an eye
That might behold it.
What is it
One sees in the place
Where the light
Will be,
But is not,
But is not yet?
EPIPHENOMENON
The lizard,
born it seems of fissures,
Skims and quivers up the rock-wall,
Insinuates itself between chipped mortar
And a holdfast of lemon thyme
And is gone, resorbed again into stone.
Another nameless spectacle,
the man thinks,
As he opens the door and a new day enters with him.
He moves from room to room,
Pulls the black crepe from the mirrors,
Finds himself reflected there in each.
SPECULATION ON THE HISTORY OF DRAWING
The tool,
A burnt stick,
Extends the body
In this space
And through time.
The mark renders,
We assume,
Asserts meaning
We might yet read:
An abstracted serpent,
The moon’s trajectory,
