Nocturne
1.
I have my night my hours of greater magnitude
my time to settle in with the essential form of things
I have fireflies and catchlights moving between the trees
a deer’s glass footprints along the ground a vapour
of rabbits in the hills I have the pulse of stones
and the dead ribboning through
uncombed grass
each night I lay down with the ghosts of Pikaia
and become glamoured by their incandescence
their glow like that last sunset in Doggerland
like the shimmer of dna sequences ancestrally
inserted into a genome that bounty of light
in the germline.
2.
a quiet night clouds rolling in the microgravity
of a single thought somewhere out there in the dark
it might be one of my own it might be something
created in the Paleolithic still wandering about
like the exoskeletal remains
of insects adrift in the air or simply be the spindrift
of comprehension between one life and another
I’m walking down to the lake with a dappling
of moonlight across the forest floor
with stars overhead migrating like fetal cells
into their mother’s body
a lip of water around a stone quivers
flies among the bitterweed polish their lenses
while angels in their ghillie suits
shift their positions
under the cover of darkness
out here human realities don’t matter much
and yet this is where you’ll find transcendence
the soul-enveloping absence that is the inner life
this is where you’ll find the true weight
of consciousness
those emanations of cloudless time
cerulean blue threading thought to flesh
flesh to intuition preordained like a fine
dust to fall on the loved and the unloved
in equal measure.
3.
there’s an old saying
night is the poet’s day
I like that and night’s dharma black-gripped
around each tree and blade of grass
holding tough to the tenderest gesture
to all the metamorphoses of a singularity
I like my unceasing belief that I exist the way
I turn my head when my name is called
the way night questions all my assumptions
as I walk as I add my shadow to other shadows
to the dark deities of postbelief
as I listen to someone shelling crickets
as I listen to the hymns of ditch water and cattails
motherwater carrying intercellular activity
at the intersection of corona and birth
I am one of those always in a liminal state
always thinning into reality
then fading out again always following
those lost on that long journey
between one thought and another.
4.
I walk along depending upon the surface of things
and loose approximations of thought
I have small reasons for what I do
for the blending of cognition and deed
I rely on the stabilizing properties of whisperings
exquisite and venerable
murmurations in the undergrowth leaf-talk
and moss-chant all that chlorophyll has to offer
my footsteps contain all the hard labour
of petals falling on lace
I move quietly slowly a walking
meditation a sleepwalker with no bed
to return to walking down an old logging
road overgrown with goatweed and fleabane
I am the sleeping one
I long for the mediumship of cicadas
the foretelling of their seventeen-year voice
the sweet arcana of their chorus to guide me
I look for the mercy of lost places for a place
that’s not a place at all I look for precious things
transformations of allegiances and pain
as I pass swamps and cranberry bogs
I look for the lowest places ones that might
teach me how to breathe like earth and water
help me find a place
time-lapsed between heartbeats
after walking for hours standing beside
the lake beneath a convergence of planets
surrounded by the synchronicit...