“Every kind of poem shines with its own beauty.” Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux.
Dead snakes and fallen fruit are augurs of unknown events, and true to form, the retrograde nature of Mercury has stymied several areas of my life of late. Stumped trees make way for vibrant banana plants. Organic processes bring forth big emotions, or something of that nature, so Wordsworth said someplace I cannot recall. Once, I was knee-deep in criticism and theory, highlighting this passage, underscoring words in that passage, scratching my head at Hegel’s articulation of the third sphere. Now, the stories are slipshod, the currents of narrative coming in and going out again, familiar patterns, written tics that betray my limited view. Too many stories end in the falling, sinking, and dropping of things. I am a symbol. In pace with the diminishing laws that dictate there are less days left than lived, I find comfort in a shadowed deer on an evening hillside, pain in the last song of a once vibrant man, hope in the possibility of a forgotten god caught in a stained glass window in some church adjacent to a ruined cemetery. In language there are only lies. Cold tea and cracked panes. Ingots. Burnished lamps cast soft glow on secretive doings. The snapped-off wing of a moth is trapped in the cobweb above the desk—a stark thing, this disembodied part—the spider long since disappeared down the funnel of the vacuum cleaner. I find some redemption in the daydream, in the rippled puddle and its blurred story, in the painful truth of a total stranger. Passencore. All sales are final.
