He had decided not to exist.
He could no longer ignore
The promptings of the planet,
who said she was not
physical
At all.
The dense bodies that were
for his play
are archives today, stale
data
that had pulled him in like an eye
From a forest.
He was no longer free
In solid form's tyranny
where what is rejects
What is
not yet.
The bodies always
Fall from the skies
to weigh
upon the baby's breath
that would vibrate to transparency
otherwise.
There is purpose to such structures,
he'd supposed,
Like those cavernous chambers for
Merovingian giants
that seemed built to capture light.
They spoke of secrets
never to be revealed,
knowledge unrecoverable.
It seemed to be enough.
But now,
as generous with scarcity
as it had been,
it seemed too much
a standard
for his inadequacy,
Like the color of a blue jay as it flies.
He'd dug in the ruins
for grubs and glimpses of
what never was
But his hands became stone.
He could no longer handle
the landscape
without the thing in it to find.
This morning the military operations
are pure sound
— no planes, no motors, no
motion —
Like whale song — not exactly music, not precisely
code —
but the unwinding
of what's been stuck to the side,
the barnacles,
the knives.
