Sunday, October 31, 2010

Resurrection Architectures

I.
By the river,
Trees are bent toward the city
Broken, torn by the wind, stripping away
Makes trembling naked
Shuddering, shrinking back from
Bright rushing cold.

Nature fearing her own cruelty
Reaches for strange, foreign shelters
Kept warm by her burning entrails.

Who will stand up?
Raise their eyes
To go with the trees
Letting the wind crush away warmth,
Tear away colors
of blood, of gold
now strewn and
left for rot:

Abandonment
Reaches not merely those with mouths.

The sun perches desperate,
Clings rakishly to the horizon.
Desolation extends its hand,

We are torn and buried
Half the world watches, jeering.

But soon, our hearing will fade
The image of your lips half-parted darken,
Your fingers draw through my hair
and fall away,
The blood-red leaves go swirling into ice.



II.
Pressed to you
is all my forgetting,
Fading into brilliance.
Gaping wounds staunched
Filled, bursting with fresh blood.

As evening goes down to the water
As light slinks from the windows
As summer's devastation shrinks before the frost,

Your eyelids are drifting closed
on a former life,
Lashes brush away tears long frozen
hovering across the years
fragile and persistent
A shroud of mist
that numbed fingers and lips
Now touched, goes fleeing disowned
Into a future once dreamt,
In all its wretched glory.

I have known darkness,
But not this darkness.
For this one shimmers,
and my heart races to know and understand

How tiny things have immense shadows
How a single rose petal enfolds my entire body
in sweet silk, and
Why the oceans recede
When you open my wounded hands.



III.
This room, stifling cube, is
Collapsing, bursting explosive

Arms outstretched in abject wonder,
My lungs inhale the long-absent breath.
Ash and cinder washed away,
I scrape the decay from my face
As brick and cement are
Cast into the sky,
Fall screaming into the sea.

Hair aflame, the sun scorches my skin
Newly exposed after years of
Burial and frozen mud.

I lift my eyes
And the future fills the empty fields
New buds burst where before leaves bled
The sap is rising in the forest, in me
And the coarse tundra catches
Soft and damp my feet
Running, flying through the bright dawn.

The ruins are cracking
The remainders, sinking in the salt
I look back, and all around
My heartbeat rushes,
Deafening
As my fingers learn to touch
and my throat, to sing.

Behold: the screaming red air
and know,
"All is made new."

Friday, October 1, 2010

The Final Vision, II

Surrender, howls the guard
Surrender! and the dog-men
horse-women go on working,
cutting up the flesh as they trample
Ice chews their fingers to the bone.
Wind runs down the trenches
Gnashing cruel wet teeth.

Beside, the machinery sucks and grinds
with starlight energy
the surrendered.
Seeing and un-knowing,
The defiant smash the remains of their obedient future.

That roaring crushed blackness comes for all,
yet the guard encourages and pleads:

Surrender! and do not be afraid,
See, how time glistens and spits,
what is to come.
Look at the woman you love! and know -
You will be one with her as you are torn through the air
Find union in separation, and in ripping
a prelude to the final rushed pressing together
for all the earth's remainder.

No one understands,
nor do they notice as the blood mixes and seeps
through worn out shoes.
Some have closed their eyes,
inhaling as the stench arises in funereal chant,
thick and hovering.

The guard is losing his voice.
Frenzied with exhaustion, he falls
and weeping, convulsing,
his body is borne into the pounding deafness.
The Living are silent, as the Dying
crack and burst.

The earth churns beneath him.

Dull and feeble,
the senses fade.

As August Fades

Into the sea: we glide
like dreams irresistable,
cold current tongues slice
the hot stomach, turning it up
to the bright surface.
Our eyes flicker open to the
sun's searing stare.

Silence surrounds.
Except breathing, roaring and
crashing in my ears.

The world's gentle rolling will carry us,
like this,
toward immense wreckage.
Bits of ships and bottles
Crunched and groaning
with salty wounds,
all heaped high and clumsy.

Within cool shade
the center rests,
That pulsating deranged mass of
bones, flesh, metal, lost cargo
Varying states of decay and
Conches - sighing, faintly wailing
Moments of all that ever was.

The sight is madness, and the sound:
entrapment.
Above, your shadow floats across the sun.

I cling to the rot as the shells
Sing the forgetting in images and tales,

Sing the air from my body,

Sing the pounding out of my throat,

Sing the darkness close around and,

Whisper grief to my remains.