Absent Presence
Inside death—the lived world
its
immense unfixed fixity
green
shoots of grass
angry thrust of the amaryllis
its
painful branching underground
Silence in a dark farmhouse
far
from the road
Or looming headlights
to illumine
suburbia
There’s a pathway, genealogical
creeping below the hard and broken
stones father,
father, father
whatever you’re missing
its silence
its oceanic quiet
fills
the body
inside death
There inside the body, room
for
small creatures, room
for
immensities, room
for
numerous folds, unfolding
like
O’Keeffe’s Dark Iris III: an internal suffusion
pungent
nautilus of gray inside death
In suburbs, in cities, in the illicit creeping heat:
death, that machine that guts & bends
waking
the sleepers inside
the
sleeping
waking
the dreams
inside
the sleepers
The sift & visible conscious
like a giant lidded eye dreaming, then wakeful
ruminating
nestled
and nestling.
a lathe
that runs and churns on emptiness
the
lack
what
we want and want
inside
the very skin in the body
an easeful repetition
mother, mother, mother
the cellist woos us, bending—
sullen throb, into those infinite tines
as if nothing stops,
ever—
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