2016-09-17



Salt flats of dream of memory of dream ... limitless horizons
and out on the utmost rim (can you see?) a house
white-on-white abstract except for the room-within-a-room
which can’t be seen but can be known, white being one thing
in sunlight another under moonlight, not oblivion, not revival,
and the soul’s song across that windless landscape, unheard;
by night the heart-stopped silence, by day the rising glare.


Graves under bramble and a wet light through the trees.
A quietness something like stealth or sudden absence; it seemed
to gather and disperse. Rat-run, ground for stray dogs, a place
where lovers come to be swallowed whole by half-light.
You could lie down here on thorn, on stone, and find your match.


Wind-driven salt in the crevice of the rock is how
memory works: image, invention, regret. It maddens
with its ersatz colors, unknowable language, sudden reversals,
shoreline, skyline, cityscape, landscape ... There are those who wake
with the whole thing fixed at the forefront of their minds:
a stage-set, people held in a frozen moment who will break
to action soon, one fearful, one laughing, one clawing at her eyes.

--from "Salt"; David Harsnet



[via POETRY; September 2016]




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