There at the petal’s edge a hint of decay encroaches upon the timeless stillness of the still life. The sunflower, seed-heavy, hangs its head. As if to fix the flux: a distant bell about to be rung.
: :
A border is composed entirely of echo, enough repetitions to suggest endlessness. The usual problems of translation await. A root is to the ground, after all, what a spectrum is to the sky. The argument, reiterated, reveals its flaws.
: :
Returned from a journey to the underworld, one is luminous, magmatic. Well-taught, one is like a child, who interrupts by apologizing for interrupting. One reenters the formal gloom of the gothic woods to again map the incoherence.
: :
Years of standing and evaporating water have rusted through the wheelbarrow. Memory is afloat, not anchored, and nudges about the room like a helium balloon as the furnace fan kicks on and off. A ripeness, not contained, gives in to wither and rot.
: :
O for a standstill! For an ex-voto to ward off danger! For the future snows that will cover one’s grave! O for the beveled facets of the crystalline, the ricochets of light that efface shadows in a shadow-flooded space! For a mute touch to disperse these melancholy meditations.
: :
Snow falls. Slows. Takes its time in falling. By the time the inventory of the present is complete, the present is obsolete. We long for emptiness without containment, and seek, like fire, what language cannot convey. Along the journey, we stop as needed. Breathe when a sentence ends.
: :
One is abstracted. One withdraws, is pulled away, diverted, dragged off for a lapse of time. From and apart. One is difficult to understand, abstruse. One lacks representational qualities, even those listed above. One is an abridgement, a summary. Often absentminded. One is more authentically experienced elsewhere. Removed, one remains.
: :
On the sublunary world, the lodestone attracts iron. Amber rubbed draws straw. A chameleon’s liver burnt raises thunderstorms. A pocketed stone makes one invisible. A carbuncle shines in the dark. Asbestos, once aflame, is rarely if ever extinguished. The sacred, however, is a place apart.
: :
Each brick is removed and numbered to build the temple elsewhere: not now but in a future that will not recall the initial shelter. Set aside, left in a heap, the bricks disappear one after the other: filched by locals to repair their houses, thrown by youth at the occupying soldiers. The temple, unenclosed in the future, has a single brick as its threshold.
Eric Pankey is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently Vanishments (Slant), and professor emeritus of English at George Mason University. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia.
Image: Anne Nygård. Unsplash, 2021.
