elemental tracings

                                                                       

 

I–

 

Image of the other:

outside the intimate sphere

 

                     a tapestry wherein

                     a lion devours a king

 

we frequently deployed identities

that masked interior motivations

                     as if

                        dredged from the depths

                                 of a collective ocean

 

 

 

II –

 

The common folk

took to inventing

monsters in corn fields

 

         the reasons were clear

         to those who read

         the writing on the wall

 

in between the lines

we invented fictions

         in passive vignettes

         to satisfy a subconscious urge:

 

fleshing out the ills

of an ontological indeterminacy

 

 

 

III-

 

‘A fig tree shall bloom

out of season’

 

            thus says the arcane oracle’s extant utterance

 

as such the bell tower

calls the faithful to gather

 

                     some prefer to enter

                     a house on the hill

                     abandoned since winter

 

others leave home

to pursue an elastic fate

haunted by irrational fears of death

 

 

 

IV –

 

Before there were words

there were mountains

            which defined limits

 

the shaman’s dance

comingled with the deities

we venerated

 

we understood identity

in phases of the moon repeating

 

            then life

            which infused the atom changed

 

abraded lines on cave walls

point to a sanity’s scouring

a cognitive wills’ interpreting

a shared indeterminacy of essence

 

 

 

V-

 

A stranger spoke

of how we came

to see ourselves

as separate

 

            spaces within

            a cathedral

            where the music does not

                                               resonate

 

the strand

of a serpentine helix

            then a theory of strings

                                             evolved

 

                                 and within these

                                 stone houses

                                 an identity

                                 which defies

                                 time’s

                                 enervating encroachment

 

 

© Ric Carfagna

10/5/09