The eyes of stars expect me to know more
than they’ve informed me, to take my place
beside their blinding gleam, and to preside
over a sleep I leapt to leave behind.
Insouciance, she said
—or was it the fragile ground trying to hold me,
to seduce the sky with me as swaying sword,
in a place without life, a sacrifice
of its only son, the one who understands?
Delicious, she sang
All my life before then
collected to a point
that popped when I admitted
what she was there for;
the silence, and the darkness
spoke of what they were,
the truth, vanished, behind the curtain.
There is nothing but me to listen to
And I make no sound at all
As my senses found
their natural end
and death was still not
opposed to life,
the stars changed places in the sky.
There is no place else to go
There is nothing more
If you choose to move
Thousands of years will have been wasted
But that is what they are there for.
I washed the mud
off all my fingers
from chocolate rivers under rock salt lakes,
the taste of mountain tops
beneath the deepest piers,
still bound up in waters on the earth’s floor.
And I am not the first
to be fooled by this, to feel a fool
because I believed
everything else
When I climbed Derrida’s Wall
only to fall down a river of shaggy stones
the froth and sibilance
was my own breath, the collapsing
ground my shape.
The fire finds the wind
the earth finds the water
prospectors pan for meaning
but only find ideas
in the silt of what’s been left behind—
is there something to impress the sky?
I wake up, it’s like the surface of the moon,
the sky inside the dome
glows unheavenly blue,
the strands of straw that seem to grow here
are greater than any soldier,
these monoliths of rock, wiser than the Gods,
have withstood every hierophant,
orange, pink and green architectures of stone
seem placed here to defy any artist
with clues enough to trick the most intrepid science mind…
This place exists
to clean the slate
to show there is no judgment
in the defeat of all our magic.
For here is our soul we pretend is a hole
there’s no more crawling inside;
we lie exposed, wide to the wind,
bereft of another lie, that in merely surviving
we do or we don’t … matter.
Your yearning has set you free
But you will never find me
There is nothing but joy in that.
