The Armature
I want to write of women
But can only think of water
I want to smell sweat
But can only hear dusk
I want to feel breath
On the page
But succumb instead
To a paralytic quiet
And my mind hikes
Precipices of
Quartz amalgam
Gullies of Mud Shale
Amidst roughed-out
Millstones laying
Like primordial molars
The fault-line scarp
A broken jaw
I am thirsting for one taste of
The interstitial ice locked in
Table Rock’s canny vestibules
Pinched ravines with
Tortured hemlock
Singing out the cracks
Big-hearted trees that split cliffs
And shake the sky
Nesting place of Towhee and
Bedchamber of Coyote
Where he sings himself to sleep
With microtonal glissandi
But what does it all rest upon
What anneals gravity
With rain
And tempers sod
With lightning
What hangs this all together
Like a circular spray of
Inward-leaning cane
Holding fast in a deluge
Is it the stone of this mountain
Upturned remembrance
Of ocean shallows
And silicate beaches
And if I dig beneath the talus slope
Past the pupae and the snake eggs
Below the mole’s paradise
And grasp that bedrock
With both hands
Entrained in the sway of its
Piezo-crystal ululation
Will I finally touch the coil
The armature
Its dielectric windings oiled by
Stray neutrinos and slippery quarks
Will I be wired in
A million pores screaming
To God’s sacred current
Will the song that stops sound
Stops thought
Resound once in my brain
And be gone
Like a bell without echo
A single pulse with no
Dancing arrhythmia
Or metrical hydraulic reply
Will the Ur-Sound
Uncoil me
Strip me clean of
Muscle and myelin
Unspool the hectares of helix
That pack my cells like
Hexagons pack hives
Unbound the calcium ions
My neurons share
As their Last Supper
Leach the milk from my bones
Until they are as light and porous
As a Seagull’s
Will I be trephined
Bored through and through
Until the light finally
Shines edge to edge
And my beatific smile
Is all that remains
A Cheshire crescent
Etched quietly
In lichen
But can only think of water
I want to smell sweat
But can only hear dusk
I want to feel breath
On the page
But succumb instead
To a paralytic quiet
And my mind hikes
Precipices of
Quartz amalgam
Gullies of Mud Shale
Amidst roughed-out
Millstones laying
Like primordial molars
The fault-line scarp
A broken jaw
I am thirsting for one taste of
The interstitial ice locked in
Table Rock’s canny vestibules
Pinched ravines with
Tortured hemlock
Singing out the cracks
Big-hearted trees that split cliffs
And shake the sky
Nesting place of Towhee and
Bedchamber of Coyote
Where he sings himself to sleep
With microtonal glissandi
But what does it all rest upon
What anneals gravity
With rain
And tempers sod
With lightning
What hangs this all together
Like a circular spray of
Inward-leaning cane
Holding fast in a deluge
Is it the stone of this mountain
Upturned remembrance
Of ocean shallows
And silicate beaches
And if I dig beneath the talus slope
Past the pupae and the snake eggs
Below the mole’s paradise
And grasp that bedrock
With both hands
Entrained in the sway of its
Piezo-crystal ululation
Will I finally touch the coil
The armature
Its dielectric windings oiled by
Stray neutrinos and slippery quarks
Will I be wired in
A million pores screaming
To God’s sacred current
Will the song that stops sound
Stops thought
Resound once in my brain
And be gone
Like a bell without echo
A single pulse with no
Dancing arrhythmia
Or metrical hydraulic reply
Will the Ur-Sound
Uncoil me
Strip me clean of
Muscle and myelin
Unspool the hectares of helix
That pack my cells like
Hexagons pack hives
Unbound the calcium ions
My neurons share
As their Last Supper
Leach the milk from my bones
Until they are as light and porous
As a Seagull’s
Will I be trephined
Bored through and through
Until the light finally
Shines edge to edge
And my beatific smile
Is all that remains
A Cheshire crescent
Etched quietly
In lichen
