Ephemera

neslockheart

The old woman sat naked in a wicker chair under a jacaranda tree at midnight, sprinkled with purple petals, dreaming of a handful of dust.

*

Everything in the house had to be put in boxes, even the tiniest object--because that is all death means--handled, wrapped, listed, stored.

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It was gathering food among rocks in the arroyo--grasshopper mouse, no bigger than a thumb--then shadow, wings, owl, a silent puff of fur.

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After the performance, she removed the sweat-stained costume and her makeup; then, because of the mirror, her face, which was now complete.

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Days later, Monday, work, it was already forgotten, that moment in the dark when by synchronicity they climaxed together and were destroyed.

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Hot wind, sand blown against plate glass, centuries now, and a fine-etched image emerges, a city, maybe, if anyone were there to see.

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That metaphor is dead that says he plows a field and under the sweat of his plowing something writes itself in compost: dead metaphor it says.

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Carrying grocery bags, he walks as far as he can through the scorched land without stopping to eat, or think, or pull out his rusted pistol.

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They had wandered years though wilderness, looking, not noticing until the land cooled and greened around them that the children were gone.

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I told you, he said to the gravestone, someone will always be here, someone will remember the story--as they lowered him, he said I told you.

Singularity

Cameron Gray

The work was done in her tiny garden dark with the shadow of an office building that lay over her peonies like a bruise or an event horizon.


*


The labyrinth of gravity solved simply by converting string theory to thread, she slew the minotaur of density and floated out of history.


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The grandmother told a story as they walked, of a girl walking with her grandmother into the forest where a wolf and a girl told a story.


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When the monkey she'd let in her bed revealed himself, she saw the problem with the Great Chain of Being was not the being, but the chain.


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A nameless light in the night sky; the animal howls, gnaws his chain, and dies, not knowing the loss of the word "dog," the name "Pompeii."


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We hymned to doctors; we chanted to priests; we ate strange powders, drank potions, fasted. When we died, our fever modulated into the key of sulfur.


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The carnival of apocatastasis rolls into the galaxy not an eon too soon, setting up its canopy over the abyss so the sun can go out dancing.


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The vortex on the pond where the water strider had been was the sign not of the something that took it but of the nothing that did not.


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One moment in the steely galaxy a falcon gyred, then stalled in his striding on a ripple in the locus: then a spray of neutrinos: then void.

Night Sea Journey

The poem independent of the poet is poised between the abyss of oblivion and the abyss of readership.


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Oblivion negates the poem; a readership atomizes it, absorbs it, excretes it, returns it in the form of a fine, pure cultural dust.


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Culture composts its materials, reducing them to their constituent elements for reuse; poetry breaks down into pure crystal, diamond-dust.


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Left to itself and to the living, the precipitates of poetry are inert, infertile, potentially destructive: abrasive, clogging, ossifying.


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Culturally, the relationship between poem and a readership is transactional, bipolar; gift economy requires a triangle. What is the 3rd term?


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Part of the soul of the poem belongs irretrievably to and with the dead, who supply part of its necessary material and enforce its closure.


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The dead occupy a third abyss: not of oblivion or atomization but memory; as long as we are, they are: of necessity and not supernaturally.


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Collectively our memory is our DNA; it eats individuals; it atomizes them, obliviates them, uses them. Death is not in hell but in the cell.


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Everything in culture is biological, belongs to the body and likewise to the body politic; the dead form the third point to which all tends.


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The dead are the precipitates of the living; they live on in us collectively; the poem is yours and mine, but Poetry belongs to the dead.

Canon

Butt Johnson

On a shelf above the Ark, where a cherub, deploying tamed cyclones, supervised the dusting, God set his beloved collection of shrunken heads.


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What he had constructed contained all the necessary elements for levitation, but his ascension was thwarted by an opaque cloud of words.


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He might have slept, but the thump of blades on wood startled him, and the muffled screams ahead, and the fighting not to lose his place in line.


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She was reading a book on the bus: soldiers, betrayals, executions; it absorbed her as the bullet smashed the window just before her stop.


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All she found was vital, anything en masse a collection. After years, from the weight of the massed material (string, paper, dust), the house mutated.


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They wrote a wall in the forest; ages they raised it, letter by letter, and in the end they stood behind it, but the enemy was illiterate.


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The slaves brought stones from a quarry; they were made to shape them, pile them up, and ascend, blindfold, the stairway of their own sweat.


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Moonlight through the harp cast a shadow of the angel gathering poems from the desktop, sucking their souls through to Poetry.