AUGURIES
Inside the camera obscura,
a cloud,
Or the image of a cloud growing darker.
The past warps, curls back round to touch the present.
: :
Is it the spit and clay on the blind man’s eyes
Or the little spell of words that returns sight?
Look, they said.
So I looked. But I saw nothing.
: :
A book of moths. A book of sand.
A book of stones unstitched from the wolf’s belly.
Shot through with light,
a book of blank pages.
: :
The solution embodies yet keeps hidden
All dissolved within it,
keeps the hermetic
Hemmed in, the secret secret a bit longer.
: :
The Geiger counter’s tick-tick like an old clock’s.
Foreign voices on the shortwave, static
Like a mother’s shush,
like crushed salt through a sieve.
: :
The past waits unmoved:
a rusted wrecking ball
In a vacant lot: a scoured erratic
Set down by a glacier— out of place, useless.
: :
A book of nuance that resists closure.
Book of Desire.
Book of the Vertigo of Desire.
Book in which the whole is latent in the partial.
: :
Rooks roost in the quarry cliffs; goldfinches
Flit and dart. Water long hidden in shadowed cisterns
Takes on a ferrous edge.
Look, they said.