Dark matter in precious abundance
A Thousand Miles North
A thousand miles north and the sun has freeze-dried, its grey skin cracked and splintered into the spaces torn between cold and rain. There the great river is a scar of cement, its centiccated bones seized and tumbling endlessly upstream in the bleached maw of a soothing dam that disciplines adventurer blood to behave, to settle for what tame fences and willful resignation offer. This was Oregon on my pocket map and I spoke its careless names as they gently whispered and fell from tugless barges and indentured trains that always meeked and slipped the wet rails of the Gorge, barely coursing through.
A thousand miles east and I am caught in the photograph Kim took of me on New Year’s Day 2001 when a new millennia brought the first snow to Santa Fe as I leapt shirtless, arms outstretched, bounding onto the chalking walk, my unkempt hair spilling black jute down my broad love-handled back, the skin sagging from where my left shoulder had been shattered some ten years before, my feet hovering inches above the Earth in the microsecond that I was a brief cryonaut at once one with the scrabbled snow that scarred in long stretchmarks of thin frost and glaze as the sky flaked hard milk from a leaking cosmos. This was the realm of luminous ravenfeather where I found essential dark matter in precious abundance.
A thousand miles west and there is a place that is no place, a liquous patch of wet blue that came to visit and remained to remake itself over and over, having been borne on the backs of a billion comets, fluid orphans of stranded ice that carried up into heavy nimbus all that we would become from the fire within its frozen womb that all the worries of the world might find their faceless wrinkles here in such sorrywater as we kissed our shadows into the palm of a bay that made an Africa of light between us. This was the grand empty, the wept hull that set the keel of my pelagic heart.
A thousand miles south and I am indigenous in a sudden land that throws itself at the heavens in brown blood and magma, settles each day’s account with the sun in sacrifice, taken or given, the pistoned purse of houred breath surrendered to a blade of sand driven by the footstep that presses its eternal print into the skin of the Unknowns, where each flowered kiss is an expedition into pyramous love that the root of becoming might take its leave so that Time cannot matter and thus it may endure. This was the stranging land of my forebears, the side of the tree that proffered shade among the slept serpents, gave rise to the simmered kingdom of apothecary frogs, where the eagle considered all that it was before what it was not, and the merciful scorpion sought to carry the dying world on its scourged and fragile back.
Joseph Gallo
January 19, 2006
A thousand miles north and the sun has freeze-dried, its grey skin cracked and splintered into the spaces torn between cold and rain. There the great river is a scar of cement, its centiccated bones seized and tumbling endlessly upstream in the bleached maw of a soothing dam that disciplines adventurer blood to behave, to settle for what tame fences and willful resignation offer. This was Oregon on my pocket map and I spoke its careless names as they gently whispered and fell from tugless barges and indentured trains that always meeked and slipped the wet rails of the Gorge, barely coursing through.
A thousand miles east and I am caught in the photograph Kim took of me on New Year’s Day 2001 when a new millennia brought the first snow to Santa Fe as I leapt shirtless, arms outstretched, bounding onto the chalking walk, my unkempt hair spilling black jute down my broad love-handled back, the skin sagging from where my left shoulder had been shattered some ten years before, my feet hovering inches above the Earth in the microsecond that I was a brief cryonaut at once one with the scrabbled snow that scarred in long stretchmarks of thin frost and glaze as the sky flaked hard milk from a leaking cosmos. This was the realm of luminous ravenfeather where I found essential dark matter in precious abundance.
A thousand miles west and there is a place that is no place, a liquous patch of wet blue that came to visit and remained to remake itself over and over, having been borne on the backs of a billion comets, fluid orphans of stranded ice that carried up into heavy nimbus all that we would become from the fire within its frozen womb that all the worries of the world might find their faceless wrinkles here in such sorrywater as we kissed our shadows into the palm of a bay that made an Africa of light between us. This was the grand empty, the wept hull that set the keel of my pelagic heart.
A thousand miles south and I am indigenous in a sudden land that throws itself at the heavens in brown blood and magma, settles each day’s account with the sun in sacrifice, taken or given, the pistoned purse of houred breath surrendered to a blade of sand driven by the footstep that presses its eternal print into the skin of the Unknowns, where each flowered kiss is an expedition into pyramous love that the root of becoming might take its leave so that Time cannot matter and thus it may endure. This was the stranging land of my forebears, the side of the tree that proffered shade among the slept serpents, gave rise to the simmered kingdom of apothecary frogs, where the eagle considered all that it was before what it was not, and the merciful scorpion sought to carry the dying world on its scourged and fragile back.
Joseph Gallo
January 19, 2006
post-time 8:06 PM
3 Comments:
'A thousand miles east and I am caught in the photograph Kim took of me on New Year’s Day 2001 when a new millennia brought the first snow to Santa Fe as I leapt shirtless, arms outstretched, bounding onto the chalking walk, my unkempt hair spilling black jute down my broad love-handled back, the skin sagging from where my left shoulder had been shattered some ten years before, my feet hovering inches above the Earth in the microsecond that I was a brief cryonaut at once one with the scrabbled snow that scarred in long stretchmarks of thin frost and glaze as the sky flaked hard milk from the leaking cosmos.'
This has to be one of the best sentences ever written.
Best? Thank you and I'm genuinely joyed you liked it, Stephanie. It is certainly long in that poetically licensured sorta way.
;-)
Very bold writing, Joseph! Carries the mind away.
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