inspired by, and dedicated to, Søren Kierkegaard

1.

After all,
no matter how
the various essences
configurate through time,
we come back
from “the hypertension of the infinite”
to ourselves
to realize
we never went anywhere,
each a solitude
returning to solitude
as the Moon
to its bright round palace
on night’s mountain
or a silver fish
to its throne of blue-blackness.

The transcendence of paradox
                                                               (most urgent
fiction of mind),
                                     the leap
into becoming
in being
always lost in the now
amid the sounds of doors
jumping from their hinges,
the ever-misunderstood
ever-created music of the heart.

We step into
the unknown
and we are
here, our roots
in our tongues, our souls
in our eyes, our deaths
on our hands, our own
Imagination’s immediate fury
free in a calamitous world.

2.

The world of appearances
pulsates, delicate
as the skin of a thief.
Estrangement is objectivity,
the cold death not the bright death,
a denial of the many-voiced worlds around us
so that no longer hearing ourselves at all
we say
this is what we are
and waste our needs
freezing the flying rivers
as if the static were the real,
running from the gods within
and our common moon-swathed future
down fire-black roads
into a misshapen, shuddering night.

3.

A lot has been
lost behind the stars.
I can barely recover
one small jar of light.
In the swamp at my brain’s base 
thick ecstatic books on salvation
sleep in bottles corked with
the beaks of prehistoric birds.

When I bite into the Sun
my teeth seethe, tablets
full of prayers.