Divination
The windows are bloody with sunset.
Mothwing, timeshare, bone fissure:
reveled in wood-rot each rootworm
tremors the underside’s soft tissues.
Memory gropes through the past;
intuition sounds the cold fathoms
of the last days coming slowly risen.
Half-step, quartertone, a little blue
note, a fluff and a bop, hop-skip
caterwaul scat-slap cutting up sally.
Stopgap winding sheets of thunder
blown from a madcap drop-dead sax.
Spitshine, lip-service, lap dance—
we dishevel ourselves in dog tunes.
Never mind. Below the surface,
the live bait twists and squirms;
a lace of shadows goes sharking
toward it. Every meaning’s a grace,
swerving. All light is earthly darkness
that has yet to arrive. To arrive,
the face must displace some dream
with only time’s brokenness missing.
Nothing hard. A heart in your hair,
a door in your skull, a sexual mirror
buried in the wall’s withering gaze.
Late hour of regret. Ragged grimoire,
palmistry, foreign codes, birch rods,
ancient lore, the weather, embalming
fluid, spiderwebs, crystals of salt,
human sacrifice, potations, diving
bells, entrails, bone dice, horn cups,
tealeaves, shifty patterns of birds,
statues, dust, god’s anger, thorns,
placentas, a falling star burnt up,
cinders in the sieve of your throat.
How to Breathe
You must focus. Concentrate on the rate you take in the air. The air you more slowly expel.
*
Enter the still point at the center of this exchange. You must let your whole body participate.
*
The air is held inside you. You expand. Then exhale, and the air is gone—it’s nothing again.
*
But, of course, the air has only returned to its origin outside of you, to the ethereal beyond.
*
With each cycle of breath, you inhale the particles of matter around you then let them go.
*
You, too, are let go. You, too, are mere particles of ether. Slight matter. Vibrate and revolve.
*
Breathing in, breathing out: you feel yourself reduced to a single locus, a thrumming pulse.
*
You dissolve into the oscillations. The waves within you merge with all the waves without.
*
Each breath travels through uncentering forcefields. The body’s measureless, unfathomable.
*
No longer any you or it, there’s only the conscious universe, an endless tremoring energy.