Pallas (I-III)

I.

are you through with

courting memory,

with being saved

are you mad,

have you learned laughter, 

to act without words

are you brave

or just tired of that metric

are you moth-drawn to sublimity now

(you reside on the inside of the flame)

are you well-rendered,

are you drawn in or 

down

do you laugh now

roll in soil

name each pomegranate

weep when warranted

forgo requests

give your name freely

forgive all fathers

stand behind silence

pull up the stakes from

the ground around beauty

like a fire that consumes all before it

II.

you reside on the inside of the flame,

on the backs of the eyelids of all gods worth praising.

are you outside the arc

of the arrow of time -

that thin parabola

where what flies is always burning

with decision, direction,

the fatal assurance 

of an ending in ash

are you plasma-burning on the waves now

beyond reclamations

or portrayals

do you laugh now

III.

because names are given,

they are hard to take away

but this also means

they are hard to shake off

do you sometimes let it get to you,

all this image 

when what haunts your memory

is faceless

are you ashen with desire

(it comes only in the memory of fire)

but no one can take a name,

not really.

The Maiden, With Hands

Donate my body to silence
In the worlds between our words

Loose the tethers from our monstrous births
From the reeling, slow death
Of poisons sold by grocers
And given away freely
In the mutant woods of love.

Give all my possible futures
To that mythic resistance,
to the abilities of touch

fold these pasts
and burn them
out of time.

Gather bones with me,
Laughing,
While overhead the fire
Does what it promised

The Tree

Down there in the heart of the swamp, thick air ancient with rot and rain, there is a tree, the first tree, primeval artefact of all this spreading life. In the dark days of her youth, long before human footfalls fell on any distant plain, some phantasm of ruination slipped a burning ember down from the looming void and held it over the apex of the tree’s sky-breaking branches. This thing, demon or star-death or whatever, befell the tree and who knows why? It was a thing without reason, an unfeeling agent of nothing, just absolutely nothing, and its winding path through nurseries of the innocent holds no pattern, responds to nothing except the drive in its depths for madness, for silence, for despair. Make no mistake: nothing bright and mystical may be allowed the offense of unhindered growth.

The ember hovered at that limit, and the tree - first before all others - in its limitedness, in its simplicity, in its will to persist toward magical futures in any form, however hobbled, split. Right there, at the very root, a hard division for the smallness of the rift. And it grew, as it grew, around that threat of damage, the promise of an ashen future in the grip of flames. So her sun-facing side kept its thinking parts deep, safe at the core - all those forces of newness in action it would unfold in the new life of the forest. And her moon-lit side was left love, vitality, the passions which would animate the merely notional. This part was unfocused, a danger itself, prone as it was to fire. But the tree could only handle one adversary at a time.

In time, the terrible thing grew bored, leaving the tree to its uncertain blooming, taking the ember but not the rift. And the tree was still so virulent, so bright, it leaked love and notion out into the soil, and though these aspects were forced to mingle after their births, there in the earth beneath, they managed it, coming together in an admixture unique in all the world. What was born was the woods, this living architecture in which some few human souls now wander lost.

And what, then, of her? Of the tree who was their mother? The split grew as she did, and even as she extended herself through those lives she gave rise to, the split separated her from them. Now, she is not really living - she survives herself in these things, but her selfhood is fractured, incomplete. Her face is vanishing. Perhaps even in leaving, the visiting chaos accomplished its aims, despite being absent to reap the reward. Does it even seek victory? What now but nothing can bind her back together, can make her whole?

The void, in its infinite ambivalence, has been known to say:

"I was only, I was merely, I was just doing a job."

The tree, her echoes still barely perceptible in the tumult and wonder, in the ruinous undergrowth, has etched into her slow-coming tombstone the only sentiment which remains:

"Oh how I loved you. I loved you so."




She doesn’t love anything now.