W i l l C o r d e i r o —
Still Life with Metaphysics & Hummingbird
Smoke effervesces blue
then fades through doubt’s grayscale.
L I G H T
—broken in the tinseled rain—
is a vessel
through which the valences of shade get rinsed beyond the limits of the senses.
A train passes & so you wave
& wave away,
awake & yet dreamfading.
You oscillate until each gleaming particle becomes unreal,
a rapture in your bloodstream—
where shadows burn & carousing sap
gives you all the feels
like some still-squirming mouse neck held within a snap-trap.
All sentiment
to sediment—
strata roused as vapor trails scroll by:
eyesight is a scrim
enfolded into form.
Later,
an otherwise hapless breeze severs a cobweb’s
tethers: each milky
line’s a dendritic filament
as phosphorescent as a sneeze.
Fated in three billion years, give or take,
to echo
down a carboniferous hallway
& harden in one diamond.
Weep, little bird. Say:
I am
I am
These are the forceps
angled
in your mater dolorosa in your februaried caves: some pulp-worn
erdstall
where a snowblind patchwork
covers up throat-darkened borders. Charmed amid a hyperspace of antiquarks,
some days I live in the dualistic metaphysics proposed by Malebranche where material
& spirit slide on two separate tracks untouched, except the vital impetus
of god has fled & each side carries on through mere inertial rut.
Our human shells lie crumpled on the floor.
We emerge as the jellyfish we are,
all viscera & chandelier.
The homunculi who lounge inside us have let us borrow their spectral eyes. We look about and write long
lectures to the moonless midnight while flowers rub our faces
in their wounds.
Neanderthal skulls with trepanations: pinholes let the starlight drop
into each brain slot, like pennies
tossed into a fountain,
down & down—
So, go right ahead, Pilgrim. Make a wish
—& all of this just means:
f a r e w e l l . . .
Galamatias
& improvisations,
This insatiable, this thwarted ecstasy
of each thing
nailed to what it is!
You cannot say
truth truth truth
without a failure.
A hummingbird’s heart,
fleet with nectar’s rage, at the narrow end of a useless summer’s spell… starts up.
Dear one
across the distance
of this page, our parallels
shall never
meet.
[ antipodes ]
the owl however
a revenant
renovated
a narrowing verge
toward which
it
vanished
a novitiate
yielding no sound
o vitrifying novae
over the late field
offers fled verities
star-born idio
lect I lament
a bare wing
where the
mouth’s borne
barren
of all bairn
long the tongue
limps
torn
each lumen
harvesting lang
uage
wages its war
with the vestments
of lung
angling
the dead
vole it holds
by a talon
to never sate its
famine a thresh
old gristling
a fame darkens
the ark still
voyaging a valence damaged
as ardently a man
ifold’s disvarnished
.