Get Your Premium Membership

Read Eschatological Poems Online

NextLast
 

Polylepis

To be a polylepis tree you gotta know 
You're a polylepis tree & this knowing 
Cements by being a polylepis tree,
Knowing between diagrammatic cracks
Fork'd already info knowing during descent.
Mud run through alpine meadow. Rubberized 
Crunch on ruddy paths, rucksacks looped,
Deltoids, silly sound serious bulge spine
Ached before leaning away to swallow,
Sepia bark holding his musculature; 
Paparazzi march out crimped edges 
Of fungi, sussed then left together. 
Glottal ribbing. Skeumorph thread
Discs, spades, b-side timpani under eaves.
Copper sheaves, wine burning in cups
Thickening until dark brown oozes
At a lesser velocity, blown eardrum, 
Given the climaxes of greater viscosity—

Green epiphytic ferns stitch airy
Misconceptions (soil, root), the drawing in, 
& expulsion, the search for a golden
Arboreal rat. A tunnel-maker
Said to be densely populated in woods
Near-gone to potato farms, cattle,
The absent lecture, then, on survival plastic

Spool of thread glued to the back
Drawn in a thin white line, followed
For ur-experiment, hundreds of feet
Climb up the lateral limb, down, dug under
Grass, tunneled, then over miniature crick,
Through nodule floor-sponge, a wetland,
A watershed for a whole valley, to grass
Again, below, finding elaborate nests but
The rat escaped, the sinewy string left.
A choreography misses it, an instinct
Closest but dull, so a blind sight in high
Sun, a canopy growing at itself not up,
Sift, shrift, the want to lay down before
Night freezes the water inside the air.

A return at night to the espeletia, giants
Sunflowers shocked by moon, switch-backs,
Doing Zs, squared, cubed to the tenth clouds
Departing, something horribly there not
Constellation no not a galaxy those are
Not things let them not be where’s the
Name laying in the grass, alpine creekline
Eschatological curvature, mutter, murmur,
A yellowing light flung, the cold how they

Open little air, the screaming sleeve, there!
Of not-this this, in it, out it, here & away,
Something recalled, what a string, rat,
What ways you move, only that body,
No containers for the humans so the sea
Could get that travel-manic blue, sworn
To make another moon of it, another go,
Unfixable, in need of fixing, air adjust,
An alkalinity expectant, a Sulphur rain, 
Chattering cargo setting fire to night.

Copyright © Henri Wyatt Blumenfeld

NextLast



Book: Shattered Sighs