Signature
The handwriting is not made
of particles of ink, or it is a stain,
an intrusion, an act of fraud,
for the letter carries no blood.
In the world after the world
war, you mark the manners by
which we breed, continue, love
less than before. This hook that
has capitalized your interest,
the Latinate that lingers on
onion skin, in its final stages
of initialization. It suspends us
now, like a trapeze artist, over
the vortex of your disappearance.
Ink is such a simple thing, chemical,
molecular, re-agents color,
but your last word is Mandelbrot
made into a new fractaled world.
Your signature on the mundane
hinges with a door into her
memory, as I see her reading it
again. It is only the banks
of a river against which
the name itself must swim.
|
Evolution
for Buck
To the irreversible order of things
I dedicate my life—not the present,
but to that lie that lives on through
memories—the indelible stain on
the surface of everyday things. I
remember you coming in flustered
but alert, the last woman in your life
distanced by your inability to say
here, now, always. And yet a child
grew from the hurt. There was never
a consciousness of abandonment.
You simply walked away, back into
the Tet, the island of men surrounded,
and you but a messenger with a small
handgun. There was no going back
or forward from then. We would
fish like it was the end of the world,
and that world out of which we evolved
I owe nothing, the circularity of sadness,
the ineradicable vacuum of rest,
the passage of time—not its movement
but the tunnel through which it lets us
sees on into the virtual space of hope.
Without which, it would be impossible
to proceed, living out the backward
permanence of our own failures, yours
and mine, our bridge to being.
|
Magnolia