Dark Matter

Everything is horrible
except for these apples
and these lilacs. Except for
the open eyes of this doe
who died by the side of the road
not long ago, eyes that still look 
darkly alive for the moment.

Everything is terrible
except for the wind
and the song I hear coming
from the house next door
that’s being sung by a woman
a cappella, in Spanish I think,
although the wind
is bending her syllables
and they could be in a tongue
I don’t understand
that is moving me to tears.

Everything is lost 
except the memory
of how it’s always been like this
and there have still been apples
and lilacs, and 
in death there has also been beauty,
and there have always been songs 
to puzzle the ear and churn the air
regardless of horror and terror
and in spite of having no way
to translate happiness to all at once.

Nothing is minimized
by being startled into awareness
of what is possible 
beyond the worst we can be and do.

Nearly the last time
I’m going to say anything
about the clocks under my skin
and how the count off rhythm they deliver
relents only when my attention
slips under water and drowns

then revives itself over and over.
Nearly the last time 
I’m bothering to explain myself
about how this body works or doesn’t.
How I slide along until I hit a stone
or seam in the road and then
derail and fall singing to the shoulder.

Nearly the last time I do much of anything
with this head limping along as it does
as I try to make sense of happy and sad and 
the complicated mouthfeel of my breath 
escaping back into the mistaken effort
to stay alive exactly as I always have.  

Nearly the last time I try to make sense
and I say nearly only because
I’m under the assumption that one day
soon I’ll run into someone who will make me
want to make sense again. They’ll ask me
how I got so far in spite of the clocks and
my runaway organs.  I’ll slow down and tell them.
how in every life there’s a Someone to capture. 
Someone you want to capture.  Someone’s a trap
I want to trap. Someone is a mistake
I was born to make one more time, a someone
called by my name I haven’t met entirely well.

Our time is come.
Bloodrain washes hard

over us all. I am one
holding on against it.

Would never have believed
at a lesser age

that I would live to be drained
by existence itself of 

a hope for salvation
yet still be hanging on

from habit, not from hope.
I look for light,

see a flash here and there
which may or may not be real,

which are so distant
and diffuse 

that they serve no purpose, 
offer no direction.

I am not alone, I know. 
I hear others out there,

calling.  Maybe that’s all we are
now: solitaries, crying out, 

waiting for a light,
clawing toward flashes

we think we see, unaware of how bloodrain
has stained us beyond cleansing.  

Once I longed to pray in joy.
I longed for my tongue to form

a prayer of peace.
Now I cannot speak

one happy word.
I cannot find a thing

to praise for fear
of being betrayed

or of being named
a betrayal by others.

Once I longed for light. 
I long for nothing now

except a silent end.
No prayer, no sound,

no rain upon me.
A simple drying out

from a deluge,
then rest.

There are immeasurable things.

I don’t care what science says;
as important and respectable as it is
and as important and respectable
as we must be in rendering to it
all of what it deserves,

there are immeasurable things
that long for a scale made
from dragon tears, or for tears made
from dragon scales; there are tales
that are true with no evidence of their truth
and imaginary mountains as daunting
as any solid range.  

Scoffers will tell you otherwise, of course.
Skeptics will snap and snipe you silly.
Ridicule for breakfast, scorn for dinner,
a diet of derision all day long
and pretty soon you will start to starve
from all the trash bile you’ll be consuming.

In the midst of that remember
that there are things worth holding
that you cannot hold and beings worth knowing
who will not manifest before you. 
Among the mountains you cannot climb
are valleys where you can rest
and the map you must use to get there

is undrawn, unprinted,
as solid as dragon scales
and as clear as the fog 
around the tops of those mountains.

You’re in the foothills now
just by reading this. If you think
it’s nonsense and you turn away
it’s nonsense.

If you decide to follow
it’s still nonsense.

If you follow to the end.
If you follow it partway.
If you take one step toward it
it’s still nonsense,
an immeasurable country,
a borderland where you might belong.