Ecstasis

The river goddess turns one quarter turn each
turn each gesture fans and stills
worlds skating over water, dusk's fly. Surrendering

names feed water's eye. As the bead
toward the pivot on the surface of the disk
is drawn by what force does the goddess,

turning without turning raise a lush
column of sedge? Immaterial as gravity,
names, gender, species and genus rise and descend

the water's meaningless ever, trying

out a corpus lucida on tensor legs of alar
filament in the shallows, as in saying

over
and over a name

so her song reaches us. Each brief tense
an eye, each plash tympan omni
present joy redact the book of her creatures
by her creatures
gladly eaten, so they, too, turning

in ecstasis bear witness
themselves inventing.

Chronos

A riddle: When I look at you, you do not move,
yet when
I look away, a dam gives up all purpose,
and the natural

company of solitude is that fiction called
the self. Can you name the virtue

stand and bloom at 32 frames per second
pushing out against silk by silk both hidden
and revealed. It is patience, or perhaps it is

indifference toward rational

procession. Deny the angel-in-flesh before you
accept the angel is the angel behind
that angel. And so forth. It would be far simpler
to start with Movement as the cause of existence
and then

work backward to the Present

suspicious, uncompromising, ever alert,
free of impurities, scrupulously avoiding

all mechanical and mathematical representations,
an army of mutants, giddily paranoid, acknowledging

Turmoil, under whose cover a brief lifespan
is possible, Lord Tick and Tock commanding

several battalions of mustard seeds, grains of sand,
languishing afternoons and love's urgency. Return

is ritual, daydream, sentiment, masturbatory
surge of captive feeling into

now it wets and I am dry, my aspirations
temporarily at bay. The narrow gears
of prophesy grind
like any other noise, incomprehensible

over the sound of the breeze that plays
among the morning wheat.