Staging Creation

image from Hubble telescope courtesy of NASA

Bare a sheet of lightning, a barbed elusive hymn,
ethereal shimmy of sea and sky undressed; broken

blindness accompanies the husk, enfolding,
askew, as gesture descends at nightfall, arbitrary

in accomplishment. The time for assignation flutters
on ancient currents at rest. A tumult of cobalt withheld,

pending rudiment, aching for likeness in the face of
penultimate mayhem, an omen heaved from orb into ore.

Speech occupies the space of opinion and opposition;
sanguine admiration for sanctuary surges through the shade.

It is good.

With riotous heat, an imitation of order towers over
tide and benevolent hour, unbent, a hospice in darkness.

A lisp of heaven calls out and charms until morning.
Absence begins its rise in the heat of day, releases venom.

Craving elevation and delicacy of law, cogent ice lays in wait
to witness evening, morning born as one.

Structure expands, variegates into helter-skelter
imagination while apparitions ignite parables.

Vacant miracles: the mastery of raku, a token of chasms,
wet and welded, mobilize into bathwater mimesis.

Ash elides against hill, reckless, sired by substance,
meta-ocean firm and even, malleable prototype for storm clouds.

Cords splinter with aspiration, fall from leaf to leaf;
chains rust in vanity and piety, confess to failing floods.

Harboring the dusk, gentle cravings imagine broadsides,
undulate skyward, subordinate in their crescendo,

rocking samite into twilight, into beckonings,
shallow in division. A singular thirst with reticence

summons return; a woodcut relinquishes dirge,
wanders into diction: vowel-elect.

Hopeful verbiage weathers into a stretch
of elements arching for habitat. Vagrant

parallels, levitating airs, wrench to culminate
in hemistich and rarified tone; rancor is retrieved

from the depths of isolation. Consonance revives
destruction. Hydrogen suppresses isolation. Pristine.

Evanescent opacity disquiets brume; primordial
emanations burgeon into lyric thronged with heat.

Sight anticipates revision. Disclosure strains
against prisons of vaulted roofs. Attributes –

cartilage bashfully arrested in buoyant springs carries
pattern mimicking sound, soul, and sunspray.

A parched architecture inquires along the shoreline. Untenanted
atoms break into taut altitudes, shimmering with variation.

Chocolatine atmosphere winnows into mass, ether into anatomy,
spinning downward from its nest towards potential.

This poem is included in Seduction: Out of Eden, forthcoming from Kelsay Press, summer 2022.

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