Paleogene Sleep

I wish I had stood where the heavens gave
their burning testament above the wave,
and watched the forests kneel beneath the fire
while every hill consumed its own desire,
my shadow entering the common grave.

I would have welcomed stone made bright with speed,
the oceans closing over root and reed.
The burden of the living mind would fade
among the ash the ruined daylight made,
where every pulse surrendered need by need.

I grieve that I awoke too late to fall
beneath that ancient cataclysmic call.
I linger where the lesser endings start,
still wearing this exhausted animal heart
instead of sleeping with the first of all.

Trepanation Explanation

Why did I drill the small auroral hole in my skull?
Ask the moon, ask the tremor in the tide-pool of my blood –
for I cannot answer without unscrolling the whole
chronicle of the self I abandoned like a ship too long in port,
its ropes frayed, its hull barnacled with yesterday’s uneaten hours.
I dropped out, yes – dropped outward, I should say,
as though the world were a shell and I were tunneling back
toward the first seabed of thought.

Turn on, turn in, turn the key of the vertebrae –
and there it was: a new life unfurling like phosphorescence
on a night shore, a trembling alphabet of light
rising from each wave-crest of sensation.
The drugs – oh, those tiny chemistries,
those alchemical insects humming the scrollwork of the invisible –
lifted the floorboards of perception,
and suddenly the quotidian corridor
filled with wind, with thunder, with the blue-violet candescence
of things as they are before we bury them in names.

I reached there: the inadmissible plateau,
the upland where the mind stands unhelmeted under its own stars,
chanting the private liturgy of pulse and filament.
Was it crazy, or what –
this decision to open a skylight in the bone?
No, no: it was the sanest thing, the dearly sane,
the one act that felt proportionate to the hurricane within.

But it required obstacles to be wooed,
difficulties to be courted like shy beasts at the edge of a glade.
There were nights when the drill’s imagined whine
echoed in my skull before metal ever touched it,
and I had to steady my breath against whole genealogies of doubt.
There were days when I rehearsed the incision
the way a monk might rehearse a psalm,
mouthing the syllables of courage to no one.

Ah still, the aperture.
Still, the opening like a secret harbor
in a coastline I had long mistaken for unbroken stone.
And through it – what?
A slow pressure, that ancient stranger of the blood,
slipping outward just enough
to redraw the inner cartography.
Some claim it is madness to grant the brain
a second window onto the world,
but I found myself calmer,
as though the storm-cloud had been given
a pet door through which to prowl.

Afterward, I tried – fumbling, earnest,
ridiculous in my missionary zeal –
to bring these discoveries to the public square,
to hold up the soft lantern of my experiment
like a lighthouse flame for others lost
in the opiate fogs and bureaucracies of their own minds.
But how do you persuade the unbroken-headed
that the breach is a blessing?
How do you explain that the skull, too,
must learn to breathe?

And so my later life became
a long, shimmering attempt to understand
what the operation had truly altered –
a review of days like sifting sands,
each grain a memory of thought clarified,
or passion unsealed, or sorrow passing through me
with a strange new tact,
as though grief itself had found the new doorway
and bowed politely on its way out.

I do not yet know the final judgement.
Perhaps no one ever does.
But I walk with the quiet sense of a lighthouse tender
who has finally entered the lantern room
and cleaned the last occlusion from the glass,
letting the beam pour out
over the black, beseeching waters.

Mothman and the Grammar of Darkness

Every monster belongs to a particular landscape. Geography shapes mythology as profoundly as imagination does. The vampire belongs to thresholds, ruined castles, and domestic interiors where hospitality shades into danger. The werewolf inhabits forests, mountains, and the uncertain boundary separating civilization from wilderness. Sea serpents emerge from depths whose opacity exceeds human vision. Mothman belongs to a different environment altogether.

It belongs to artificial light.

Such an observation appears almost trivial until one surveys the testimony surrounding the Point Pleasant sightings. Again and again, witnesses describe illumination. Automobile headlights advancing along deserted roads. Flashlights sweeping abandoned buildings. Streetlights dissolving into mist. Above all, two luminous red eyes reflecting or emitting light from the darkness beyond ordinary visibility. The creature rarely inhabits absolute darkness. It appears instead at the edge of illumination, precisely where vision acquires enough information to become uncertain.

This detail distinguishes Mothman from many earlier folkloric beings. Traditional monsters often emerge from darkness because darkness conceals. The Mothman legend repeatedly stages a different situation. The observer already possesses light. The difficulty arises because illumination itself produces ambiguity. A beam catches movement. Reflection becomes anatomy. Distance distorts proportion. Perception accelerates toward interpretation before evidence has settled into coherence.

The monster occupies that interval.

Psychologists have long recognized that perception involves active construction rather than passive reception. The visual system does not simply record reality. It continuously generates hypotheses about the external world using incomplete information. Contemporary predictive processing theories describe perception as an ongoing negotiation between sensory input and expectation. The brain fills gaps, resolves ambiguity, and privileges coherent patterns over isolated fragments. Under ordinary circumstances this process proves extraordinarily successful. Under unusual optical conditions it reveals its improvisational character.

The abandoned TNT Area surrounding Point Pleasant provided precisely such conditions. Constructed during the Second World War to manufacture munitions, the site had gradually surrendered itself to decay by the mid 1960s. Concrete storage bunkers remained scattered across fields reclaimed by vegetation. Pools of standing water reflected passing headlights from unexpected angles. Rusted infrastructure interrupted familiar spatial cues. The landscape preserved the geometry of industry while surrendering its practical purpose.

Ruins alter perception in distinctive ways.

Architects often observe that buildings guide attention through lines, openings, and rhythms of movement. Ruined buildings continue performing this function imperfectly. Walls terminate abruptly. Corridors lead nowhere. Surfaces fragment. Artificial structures intended to organize space instead generate visual uncertainty. Light striking these environments produces reflections, shadows, and silhouettes that resist immediate classification. A large bird standing motionless beside shallow water may acquire impossible proportions. Vegetation growing through concrete obscures familiar outlines. The eye continues searching for stable forms while the environment continually frustrates that search.

Vision therefore becomes interpretive before it becomes descriptive.

This insight possesses a long philosophical history. Plato consistently employed light as the central metaphor of knowledge. The allegory of the cave culminates in movement toward illumination, where truth finally becomes visible. Medieval theology inherited this symbolism, treating divine understanding as a form of intellectual light. The Enlightenment elevated clarity into a political and philosophical ideal. Across these traditions, seeing and knowing gradually became almost interchangeable concepts. A problem illuminated sufficiently would eventually become understood.

The metaphor proved so successful that its limitations largely disappeared from view.

Light undoubtedly reveals. It also overwhelms, fragments, reflects, and deceives. Every photographer understands that illumination transforms an object as much as it discloses one. Too little obscures form. Too much dissolves texture. Direction alters meaning. Shadows remain essential precisely because vision depends upon contrast rather than simple brightness. Seeing therefore requires interpretation from the very beginning.

The Mothman legend exploits this neglected aspect of vision with remarkable consistency.

Particularly revealing is the recurring emphasis upon the creature's eyes. Skeptical explanations frequently point toward eyeshine, a thoroughly ordinary optical phenomenon produced when animal retinas reflect incoming light toward its source. Deer exhibit it. Owls exhibit it. Herons exhibit it. Under suitable conditions, headlights transform living creatures into pairs of brilliant floating lights suspended within darkness. 

The explanation carries greater philosophical interest than either believers or skeptics sometimes acknowledge. Eyeshine produces a peculiar reversal. Human beings ordinarily imagine themselves directing vision outward, illuminating the world through observation. Reflected eyes reverse that relation. Illumination returns toward its origin. The observer abruptly experiences the unsettling possibility of becoming the observed. The darkness appears to answer the gaze. Few experiences generate unease more efficiently.

The red eyes described throughout the Mothman tradition therefore function as something richer than anatomical details. They transform the creature into a symbol of reciprocal observation. Ancient beacons, stars, and lighthouses emitted light in order to orient travelers. Mothman's eyes offer no orientation whatsoever. They produce visibility while withholding intelligibility. Information increases. Understanding hesitates.

Semiotically, the creature occupies an unusual position. Most legendary beings possess relatively stable symbolic functions. Dragons signify chaos or power. Ravens suggest prophecy. Wolves evoke wilderness and predation. Mothman's symbolic identity remains unusually indeterminate. The creature appears significant from the beginning, yet the significance continually escapes precise formulation. Rudolf Otto's account of the numinous remains suggestive here. Certain experiences evoke fascination, awe, and dread before conceptual understanding has organized them into coherent explanation. Meaning precedes interpretation.

The subsequent history of the legend reinforces this structure. Following the collapse of the Silver Bridge in December 1967, reports of Mothman acquired retrospective coherence. The creature gradually transformed from unidentified animal into prophetic omen. The chronology deserves careful attention because the interpretation followed the catastrophe rather than preceding it. Disaster reorganized memory. Earlier ambiguities suddenly appeared saturated with significance.

Human cognition consistently exhibits this tendency.

Narrative understanding rarely develops prospectively. It develops retrospectively. Events that originally appeared disconnected acquire coherence once later developments provide an interpretive framework. Hegel's famous observation that the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk expresses precisely this insight. Understanding arrives toward the conclusion of events whose meaning remained uncertain while they unfolded. In a way, the Mothman embodies the phenomenon known as "retrospective meaning making." 

The legend also reflects a broader transformation within modern culture. Earlier monsters belonged primarily to forests, mountains, caves, and oceans because those environments represented the limits of ordinary experience. Mothman inhabits highways, abandoned industrial facilities, electrical infrastructure, newspapers, and television broadcasts. Its world already possesses abundant illumination. Electric light saturates the landscape. Information circulates rapidly. Visibility expands continually.

Yet uncertainty persists.

Indeed, modernity frequently produces the opposite relationship. Expanding access to information often multiplies competing interpretations rather than resolving them. The twentieth and twenty first centuries have witnessed unprecedented capacities for observation through photography, surveillance, satellites, and digital communication. They have simultaneously witnessed extraordinary disputes concerning evidence, expertise, conspiracy, and truth itself. Visibility has increased dramatically. Consensus has become increasingly elusive.

Within this context, the Mothman legend acquires an unexpectedly contemporary character. Its central drama concerns neither concealment nor revelation in any simple sense. Instead, it stages a crisis of legibility. The observer sees enough to become convinced that something extraordinary has occurred while remaining unable to determine precisely what has been seen.

Perhaps this explains the legend's enduring fascination. Mothman occupies the narrow territory separating observation from understanding, demonstrating that the two belong to different cognitive operations. One concerns sensation. The other concerns judgment. Philosophy has spent centuries distinguishing appearance from reality, evidence from inference, perception from knowledge. The Point Pleasant legend translates those abstractions into narrative form. Few modern monsters have captured the epistemology of uncertainty with greater precision.

Morning Walk, Basement Calls

Halifax at seven in the morning really sets the mood.

The warmth has already entered the streets. It settles across brick façades, clapboard houses, and quiet intersections with the patience of sunlight filtering through old glass, lending every surface a faint expectancy. Air gathers upon the skin, fragrant with salt, asphalt, coffee, and the resinous breath of distant trees.

A walk to work in such weather becomes an exercise in temporary sovereignty. A thermos warms one hand while the mind carries its own invisible cargo: unfinished thoughts, private hopes, fragments of sentences still searching for their rightful cadence. The blocks unfold with gentle inevitability. Painted verandas glow beneath climbing vines. Convenience stores flicker awake. Buses breathe at red lights, their windows reflecting the pale gold of morning. Every passerby seems complete within a secret narrative whose pages flutter just beyond perception. 

My thoughts drifted toward stories. They arrive with curious timing, especially when one prepares to leave your keeping. Basement Caller will appear on July 1 in Flash Phantoms. The tale has already traveled through its true country: long evenings of composition, mornings of revision, the delicate commerce between confidence and doubt. Publication resembles weather moving across the sea. A private climate expands into common air, where strangers may breathe it, interpret it, carry some fragment of its atmosphere into lives I will never witness.

Grace and I continue to move through our days with an ease that still surprises me in quiet moments. Through knowing her, I found myself standing beneath the lights of a small fashion event, an episode that shimmered with the peculiar texture shared by many happy accidents. While it unfolded, every conversation, every camera, every improbable circumstance seemed suspended inside a lucid dream. Memory has already burnished the evening with the calm authority of experience, giving each detail the graceful inevitability that belongs to stories retold.

Perhaps these morning walks reveal a simple truth usually concealed beneath schedules and obligations. A life does not advance along a single road. It resembles a river broad enough to carry many currents without turbulence. Writing, ordinary employment, affection, unexpected invitations, quiet apprehensions, ambitions whose outlines remain unfinished - they accompany one another with remarkable courtesy. They share the same pavement, pause beneath the same traffic lights, admire the same blaze of geraniums spilling from a window box. Each thread lends color to the next until the ordinary morning acquires the depth of a remembered summer whose fragrance survives for decades.

By half past eight, the city gathers itself into full momentum. Elevators rise. Keyboards begin their measured percussion. Doors swing open. Conversations scatter through corridors like birds flushed from hedgerows. Even the harbor assumes its familiar confidence, cranes turning above the water while ferries carve bright seams through the basin. The warmth remains, now richer and more generous, wrapping every street in a luminous persistence. One steps into the day carrying its quiet gift: the conviction that every commonplace hour contains an undiscovered province, waiting for the patient walker to cross its invisible frontier.

Little Devils

They swarm in corners, tiny claws on bone,
a whispering legion in the pulse and skin;
each one a mirror of the mind’s sharp ache,
collecting every tremor of my own,
and gnawing quietly where hope had been.
They squat upon the chest, unseen, obscene,
their murmur presses like a tide of flame,
and every thought I lift becomes their prey,
a festering delight they shape and claim.

I feel them crawl beneath the hair, the nail,
a thousand judgments filed against my name;
their wings beat hot against the hollowed brain.
They chant of error, folly, slow travail,
of wasted hours that only stain remain.
Each breath invites them further into vein,
and yet, perverse, I lean into the hive,
for every sting confirms I am alive,
and every prick reminds the mind to strive.

Monster Outside the School

Horror functions simultaneously as an affective experience and an epistemic practice. It gives perceptible form to anxiety, arranging diffuse apprehension into intelligible structures through which consciousness may move with unusual attentiveness. Rather than merely provoking fear, horror cultivates a disciplined encounter with uncertainty. It grants the imagination a provisional architecture within which obscure intuitions assume contour, allowing the mind to inhabit them long enough to discern their rhythms, textures, and latent significance. In this respect, horror resembles a phenomenology of dread. It studies the conditions under which fear acquires shape, persistence, and meaning.

A recurring nightmare of mine illustrates this process with remarkable consistency. The dream unfolds within a school during the depth of winter. The building stands alone amid an immense landscape of snow and darkness. The heating has failed. Cold saturates every hallway, classroom, stairwell, cafeteria, and gymnasium until the architecture itself seems to participate in the season's severity. Fluorescent lights cast a wan illumination across polished linoleum. Lockers extend in disciplined rows toward vanishing points that appear to withdraw with every step. Each corridor seems inhabited by an eloquent vacancy. The school remains unmistakably familiar, yet familiarity itself becomes a source of inquietude. Recognition offers no sanctuary. It merely certifies one's presence within a place whose exits possess an uncertain reality.

One certainty governs the entire dream.

Something waits beyond the walls.

Its presence never condenses into a stable figure. Every attempt to imagine its face dissolves into drifting snow. Every outline disperses into darkness before attaining completion. Form remains perpetually incipient, forever gathering itself without consummation. Yet the whole world inclines toward its existence. Frost flowers across the windows in delicate crystalline arabesques. Exterior doors answer every hand with the solemn resistance of swollen timber and frozen hinges. Wind presses against the walls in long respirations whose cadence approaches language without entering it. The school glows like an ember sheltered within immense hands of ice. Refuge derives its sweetness from continual awareness of the immeasurable country surrounding it.

Here horror discloses one of its oldest mysteries. Fear seldom resides within the object itself. It flourishes along horizons where perception relinquishes its authority to distance. Every settling beam, every intermittent pulse of fluorescent light, every murmur carried through ventilation ducts extends consciousness toward a threshold that continually recedes. Imagination receives fragments and fashions entire cosmologies from them. Consciousness becomes an artist working with incompletion, sculpting invisible immensities from echoes, penumbras, omissions, and expectation. Terror arises through suggestion because suggestion preserves possibility, while certainty contracts the imaginative field into determinate proportions.

The frozen presence beyond the school exceeds the figure of a beast. It gathers into itself the ancient eloquence of winter as a cosmological condition. Cold decelerates the pulse of living things and alters the cadence of perception. Snow simplifies the visible earth until every branch, rooftop, fence, and roadway enters the same luminous grammar. Darkness magnifies distance while silence acquires astonishing density. Within the dream these elemental conditions awaken into intention while preserving their immense serenity. Seasons continue their patient revolutions. Stars traverse the heavens with mathematical elegance. Rivers harden beneath transparent ice. The unseen presence appears woven from these vast continuities, bearing the grandeur of a cosmos whose beauty neither requests nor requires human witness. Its menace derives from scale rather than hostility, from antiquity rather than violence.

Many of the most enduring traditions of horror proceed through precisely this transformation. Ancient forests, abandoned houses, polar wastes, subterranean labyrinths, forgotten monasteries, and deserted coastlines possess emotional force because they exceed the proportions of ordinary habitation. Such places invite consciousness into environments whose temporal horizons stretch far beyond individual memory. Horror repeatedly discovers its deepest resources wherever human measures encounter immensities that remain serenely indifferent to human aspiration. The supernatural frequently serves as a symbolic vocabulary through which this disproportion becomes imaginable.

Perhaps this explains the curious exhilaration concealed within profound horror. Every fearful step awakens a heightened exactitude of attention. A hand resting upon a cold banister discovers textures ordinarily overlooked. A glance through frosted glass transforms drifting snow into inexhaustible possibility. Listening acquires an almost liturgical intensity. Perception matures beneath sustained vigilance. Curiosity accompanies apprehension with quiet fidelity, inviting another door to open, another corridor to unfold, another glimpse toward the white expanse beyond the windows. The mind becomes unusually receptive because uncertainty compels a more scrupulous encounter with the world than familiarity ordinarily permits.

The finest works of horror cultivate analogous movements of thought. They begin with recognizable worlds composed of memory, affection, custom, labor, and domestic routine. Gradually those worlds admit presences whose magnitude exceeds inherited vocabularies of explanation. Human understanding stretches toward these immensities through equal measures of humility and exhilaration. Wonder and fear emerge from the same cognitive disposition. Both arise whenever consciousness encounters realities whose amplitude surpasses its accustomed conceptual boundaries. The unknown therefore becomes both an intellectual provocation and an emotional event.

My recurring dream gathers these reflections into a single enduring image. Within the school survive warmth, memory, conversation, childhood, education, and the fragile civility fashioned through generations of ordinary lives. Beyond the walls extends snow without boundary, darkness animated by unseen movement, and distances that awaken instincts older than language itself. The unseen presence remains outside because its proper dwelling lies within the horizon rather than upon the landscape. Every closed door preserves possibility. Every window frames an unanswered question. Resolution would diminish the dream's singular radiance, for mystery retains its vitality precisely through its inexhaustibility. Reality continually exceeds every conceptual scheme by which consciousness attempts to circumscribe it.

What, then, waits in the frozen darkness beyond the school?

Each return yields another answer. Death walks there with tranquil patience. Solitude leaves faint tracks across fresh snow. Time advances through the forest beneath constellations whose magnificence remains untouched by human expectation. Tomorrow approaches with silent footsteps whose cadence every living creature eventually hears. Yet these figures participate in a deeper unity. The presence beyond the windows embodies the immeasurable province where imagination extends farther than certainty and where perception discovers the fecundity of its own limits. Horror grants that province a patient watcher in the snow. It then invites us, again and again, to stand before the glass, to listen with undivided attention, and to recognize that wonder frequently arrives clothed in the breath of winter.

All, One Neck

The earth bares forth its patient throat. The fog
threads tendon after tendon through the bog,
then buttons valleys with a surgeon's thread
that stitches living muscle to the dead.

Pines rake green lice from every passing gale.
The wind complains in resin, bark, and shale.
A river hauls its chain of mirrors slow
through clay that learned a million years ago

the grammar of erosion. Roots recite
their damp scholastic disputatio by night.
Moonlight, waterlogged, acquires the taste
of silver marrow, beautifully waste.

All evening heaven studies how to fall.
Cloud enters cloud. They misremember all
the treaties signed by weather. Stars withdraw,
like plague-house shutters closing without law.

Tomorrow leaks beneath yesterday's skin.
The dawn arrives before the dusk walks in.
Midnight flowers underneath the noon.
The wolves rehearse eclipse against the moon

whose orbit now declines to orbit. Time
misbuttons every hour into rhyme.
Calendars molt. Their paper vertebrae
grow feathers, fly, return as mouldering hay.

Language catches fungal bloom. Each noun
erupts with moss. Verbs trickle upside-down.
Granite conjugates the rainfall's tense.
The commas graze. The vowels climb the fence.

Philologists accuse the rocks of fraud.
The raven answers, impeccably awed,
then pockets every footnote in its beak.
The scholars spend six centuries to speak

the sentence that a salmon understood
while shouldering upstream through stone and wood.
The octopus computes with dreaming ink.
The jackdaw edits thought before we think.

What theorem blooms inside the spider's snare?
What grammar nests beneath the polar bear?
Who proved the tongue distinguished ape from saint
when wolves decline abstraction without faint?

Arithmetic perfumes the honeycomb.
The whale's deep calculus outlives the tome.
Slime mould elects the shortest road through rain
while senators debate the word terrain.

I keep a zoology beneath my ribs.
Hatreds hatch with translucent eyelids, gills,
compound ocelli polishing the gloom,
each memory another fertile womb.

They breed by fission in a glassless dish
where every wound invents another wish.
One hatred suckles numbers from a bone.
One flowers cartilage instead of stone.

One smiles through orthodontics made of frost.
One counts each tenderness already lost.
One molts into a parliament of flies
that legislate through thousand-faceted eyes.

Linnaeus coughs. Darwin rearranges dust.
Bataille baptizes appetite with rust.
Cioran oils despair till every seam
reflects the architecture of a dream.

Weil stoops to gather gravity like wheat.
Girard hears hoofbeats echo every street.
Plotinus finds the root beneath the root.
Eckhart plants silence in forbidden fruit.

Heraclitus laughs rivers into flame.
Kristeva salts the abattoir of name.
Agamben maps the threshold of the throat.
Taubes folds doomsday into every note.

Their pages mildew gently in the rain.
Earthworms annotate each mouldering vein.
The archives sweeten into fungal loam.
The footnotes find my marrow more than home.

A beautiful circulation. Rot
becomes another commentary wrought
by mouths without a language, yet they know
what all our lexicons forget to grow.

Each notification blooms like mold.
Its gospel's measured hourly, bought and sold.
The glowing screen absolves us with a swipe.
Desire matures before the fruit is ripe.

The market genuflects before its chart.
Algorithms cultivate the heart.
Each heartbeat enters metrics, graphs, and shares.
The soul accepts cookies with vacant prayers.

Augustine refreshes every page.
Debord scrolls onward through the mirrored cage.
Ellul watches machinery take root.
Weber trims ascetic branches into fruit.

Some cherub audits carbon in the rain.
A seraph balances actuarial pain.
An angel scans biometrics at the gate.
A demon moderates the town hall's hate.

Caesar posts tomorrow's afternoon.
Hildegard uploads another moon.
Plotinus dreams a neural labyrinth
whose neurons chant in Attic labyrinth.

Babel babbles beautifully askew.
Animal births anima anew.
Logos fractures into lo, go, then leaves
its golden husk among the autumn sheaves.

Earth whispers humus. Homo answers hume.
The vowels flower. Consonants exhume
forgotten beasts whose alphabetic hides
shed punctuation where the darkness glides.

Acts of excess blossom into glass.
Cathedrals germinate in molten brass.
A tyrant suckles orchids made of wire.
Stock exchanges photosynthesize fire.

The oceans chew through continents of foam.
Plastic pollinates the whale's blue home.
The satellites bloom lichens in the sky.
Advertisements teach the saints to buy.

How scholarly the massacre appears.
Each theorem irrigated by our fears.
Each white paper perfumed with powdered bone.
Each empire harvesting a seed alone.

Yet foxglove rings its poisonous delight.
Mushrooms illuminate the buried night.
A cedar meditates in fragrant sleep.
The trilobites remember in the deep.

I dream my palms upon mundi's great vein,
where granite pulses underneath the rain.
The arteries of basalt softly drum.
Whole oceans gather where the fingers numb.

I feel extinct anatomies return.
Old feathers smoulder where no feathers burn.
The mammoth's breath condenses in my lung.
Future birds rehearse an unborn tongue.

The pulse invades my pulse until each beat
confuses blood with continental heat.
Identity commits a sweet solecism.
Bone acquires botanical baptism.

The earth inclines.

Its throat remains unveiled.

History flowers where the flesh has failed.
Every beast, theologian, king, machine,
every cryptid lurking in the green,

every saint whose halo rotted through,
every market making gods from blue,
every child asleep beneath the loam,
every exile searching still for home,

enters one impossible refrain
whose every rhyme resembles growth and pain,
whose every slant rhyme wounds because it heals,
whose cadence thinks, whose metaphor conceals

a mouth beneath the mountain's breathing hide.

I hear it.

Then I answer.

Then divide.