Just when the last fiber of his being vanished in a moment of unbearable pain, just when he'd given himself up for dead, all he'd done in life to force his dreams into being fell away. A shaman of some sort, with a headdress made of golden branches, his lower body a black serpent, spread his arms. The shaman's arms became the wings of an eagle. The dead man's senses, overcome with golden light, became indistinguishable from the shaman, indistinguishable from each particular crystal that glowed dimly from the shadows, indivisible from the formal energy falling out of and rising into being, without beginning or end.
All his friends circling, dancing and laughing, around a body festooned and mounded with pale roses. In spite of mistaking dreams for reality, in spite of holding on to belief as if it were the very earth on which he stood, he loses himself in love and finds that his perceptions had never been ends in themselves, but means to an endlessly expanding end. He could finally witness them for what they were: nothing more nor less than an array of tiny stars created for feeling, and growing to love, the dark.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Tropic of Cancer
Going up a mountain in the Absarokas,
making for the unlikely event
of shade. Scattered there
on the ground, a halo
of orange butterflies, maybe four dozen
amber wing-pairs,
tatted over in black and white, attached
to velvet bodies, tiny black legs
trembling, like hands of broken watches
drawing minutes down
to no time at all, there to siphon
snowmelt from puddles filling
the tracks of a passing bear, a grizzly
from the looks of it, if those terrible
claws & the mud closing in
are any sign.
What are these denizens
of Mexico doing a thousand miles
wide of their regular migrations
way up in the aspens & sage
of Wyoming?
A jaguar stretched thin
as paper
borne aloft & torn apart
by high winds,
coming to rest,
antennae searching for scattered remains,
feeling for the slightest trace
of the jaguar's pulse,
haloed there so close,
so far from their soft beds
in the leaf-shade
of the Sierra Madre.
making for the unlikely event
of shade. Scattered there
on the ground, a halo
of orange butterflies, maybe four dozen
amber wing-pairs,
tatted over in black and white, attached
to velvet bodies, tiny black legs
trembling, like hands of broken watches
drawing minutes down
to no time at all, there to siphon
snowmelt from puddles filling
the tracks of a passing bear, a grizzly
from the looks of it, if those terrible
claws & the mud closing in
are any sign.
What are these denizens
of Mexico doing a thousand miles
wide of their regular migrations
way up in the aspens & sage
of Wyoming?
A jaguar stretched thin
as paper
borne aloft & torn apart
by high winds,
coming to rest,
antennae searching for scattered remains,
feeling for the slightest trace
of the jaguar's pulse,
haloed there so close,
so far from their soft beds
in the leaf-shade
of the Sierra Madre.
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