Sparse and Scattered Unrhymes on a Cloudy April Fool’s
M’illumino
d’immenso
-Ungaretti
—As peninsula
distinguishes itself
from island: that
crucial albeit tenuous
attachment
I’ll be to You, Immensity,
some mudflat at low tide,
musselshell-ridged, estuarial and eelgrassed,
then
self-stranded and unreachable by land whenever the tide creeps back.
—An ending comes but once or it’s not terminal.
Itself-lit still, summer-immensed. Twice-gilded.
—Behave
yourselves, lines:
scatter back at once
into the letters you came from,
not like anymore, likely not
picture-producing again
like gouges
in gouache, canvas-burnt and -stabbed,
uttermostward.
—What is it You would have me
rehearse? Not-
being doesn’t require
much expertise,
unless I’m wrong.
Unless I’m wrong
obliviation happens
without exertion, gradual
alases heading toward the terminating amen.
—There’s been for some time this hankering
to otherwise,
no locus, no in situ
I, antichronological
and known as No-One-Known.
Eraser-smudged, pink-red
blotched bloodlet straight through the back of the page.
—Will the audience
be provided
with surtitles of running
explication,
substantial time laid out
for participant questions
or accusations, due diligence
so each reader
might yet seize
some tangible takeaway
among what
seems altogether intended to elude?
—You know that feeling sometimes that the sky’s
turned all negative space,
little cobalt huddle
like an island in a sea of cirrhus.
Violet’s got the shortest wavelength
at the very edge of the visible
so gets scattered so easily by
the molecules of air,
violet our cones and the strewn
atmosphere decide to define as blue.
We see what we don’t see.
Australia-shaped and blue-perceived small
huddle of sky stranded
in the otherwise-clouds, as if
land were nothing, ocean all,
light nothing occlusion all.
—Somebody’s been talking about
the alas-ness of things
in a book I was skimming last night,
wine-drowsy, chin-jerk out of sleep:
even in egolessness comes a startled
melancholy at the utter impermanence of things, their
infusion with alas-ness.
If it ends more than once you can tell it’s not really over.
—Scratch me, luminous Immensity, like a match.
Or is there someone else you’d rather
frictive-scrape into flame?
