August 2011
The Moon
This is a dream I had the other night. It was strange. I thought I’d share it.
This is the edge of an ocean, but it is no ocean that I’ve seen before. The waves crash into one another rather than the shore, and where they meet they form dark domes of water before bursting like fruit left too long on the vine, fat and overripe. The sun is pale here and the Earth is huge, a cyclopean eye that dominates the airless sky. The Moon is cold, but I don’t feel it. My skin is glass while I’m here in my soapstone house on the shore of the endless sea.
I know my sons are coming, but what can I do? There are masks now on every side and the bodies beneath the robes they wear do not bend the right ways. Nine-fingered hands and arms with joints that crack and crunch whenever they move. I can feel their eyes on me where I sit on the sun-warmed stones by the seaside, though whatever is behind the masks have no eyes. I blunder past them, through their circle. They let me go, pulling back to watch as I run to the sea and plunge into the bubbling waves. There is only emptiness beneath the water, and it never stops going down.
Don’t forget.
There Is No God
And We Are His Prophets.
Quills
Pens for fingers
Nibs scrabbling out thin lines of meaning
Kanji scraped
Onto skin like paper
Thin and frangible.
Merchants nod in drowsy howdahs
Borne on elephantback
Through crowded stalls
Where the scent of dung and cinnamon
Hang heavy
Like the drapes in my grandmother’s house.
What can I write
That the sun cannot scribe
On the heaving back
Of the sea?
Pen-fingered
I can do nothing else.
