Interiorities

1. Time-Binding Animals

Those were stars they were birthing,
Or the stars were birthing them.
Heaven it was, that birthing,
Pausing for breath each solstice,

Bleeding with every eclipse.
Strange things were important then,
Strange to us as we to them.

Snakes were immortal.
Owl chicks devoured their mothers.
Clouds came out of pines.
Salamanders savored fire.

Those nights were the most open
We ever were. Most bizarre.
We felt enclosed in their dark.


2. A Steam Engine Behind the Event Horizon

It’s all about forgetting,
Said Craig Callender
In an unintentional
Echoing of Lewis Hyde.

I keep working in the dark,
Amidst the rubble of thoughts
Lured to each other
By the promise of nothing.

You see? wrote young Joshua
Mehigan, Everything I
Know is from a book.

Same! I cried, reading
Those lines, forgetting
Where I first heard them.


3. Delphistorical

Outside is inside yourself.
Turn away, outside yourself;
Turn the inside out.

Exposed to the open air,
The self will blister and dry.
What is the soil to the air?

Nothing. And what is the air
To the soil? Nothing much, but
Necessary for living.

The mind’s true roots lie
In the enigma
Of language, ruthless fungus.

Time is relative, changes.
Space is absolutely not.


4. Summer Cottage, Winter Cottage, Caravan

She and I are green and lie
Down in weeds, sunny and dry,
Under our blue, youthful sky.

We whisper to each other
About dream homes, like secrets,
Before we kiss and undress.

Ah, yes. Fecundity breeds
Fecundity. We know this.
But emptiness alone is

Future mother of us all,
And every almost-vacuum,
Every womb and home, the whole

Is an echo wavering
Back from the nothing at all.