Trigger Warning

The dilapidated window frame,
hanging on the eyelid of evening
closing so slowly that orange-yellow
turns unconsciously to purple,
as guitar music rumbles the floorboards,
still has an ancient charm.

Outside the window late departing ducks
huddle in the icy water.
This is when I love the sundial by the beach,
when the world is shadows within shadows
making a mind-culture of scotopic blooms.

Whatever I am, I am in this moment.

A stag approaches the sundial, then fades
into the dark as music from the room below
makes an immense metamorphosis into
rough laughter and blunted banter.
Dreaming between hallway and staircase
I ride a phosphene that I flesh out

as a flush of India ink against
still, invisible water
just before it seeps through
surface tension,
the integrity of its design
lost to a frail defect.

Disbursed fractal filaments
snake through a surface
of hissing molecules;
arms of ink stretch slowly
into curves and coils as
the fluids dance through each other.

I blink and glimpse a woman’s legs at the stairs,
and stare into her calves of supple marble,
her voice a whorl of bleached leaves.
I slip into a scene of subtle triple images
that spark at the sighs of a glass Athena,
feeling her sounds in my millstone arms.

The staircase widens out indefinitely.
Razor sharp railings drip with the life
of those dropped at an end that was the end –
a coral mine shaft in a tight spectrum
scattered in sadness dredged in the deep.

Whatever I am, I am in this moment.

The virgin forest behind the house mauls
my fugue with a blue stag in the window light.
Slight depression raises itself in a branching pose
reaching inward, abrading softly my outer layers
of safety. Hallway and staircase congeal into ordinary
shapes, which propel me into the cozy charm of plain living.

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