Long ago, who took the Opposites and clashed Them together shuddering forth Eternity with pyramidal teeth tearing Time into day and night? I leave the asphalt and cement paths. I leave my Ways aged with old answers. Torn bits of myself litter the gutters a bloody head in old newspapers an arm, a watch with Time crushed to the rack of its needle and glass. Two faces of myself sunder space my Being parts my wounds are gashes of light and darkness and on the shrubs that line sidewalks my blood-dawn and blood-dark dries. I look for myself in rocks I study mud tracks and shades of turquoise, ways of water. I am the jaguar, my pad the calm in a hurricane of claws in the dried woodbrush and loose feathers of the past. I smell my childhood in the brisk sweep of air after the rain. Then I see the child I was. Among the leaves. I call out to him . . . alone in the woods, afraid. He screams at the jaguar. He grows up on city streets. Afraid yet confronting everything, wandering. Then he is a man at his desk in his room watching the rain from his window tremble each leaf and we meet and become one.
I. I cannot explain my existence. Distance gets darker and darker. Space born to solitude, intestinal insides of cities, its edges bloody as if torn from a whole. We are without form, linger over the abyss like a wisp of cloud over the canyon in a breeze. We break the surface to feed ourselves, for air, like a fish that leaves a swirl of water on top then returns to the dark slime of the beginning. I left Arizona a year and a half ago. Someone left Greece, someone walked a city street in Mexico and learned something new. We all moved forward into something we knew nothing about. There is no Time, Space or Distance to hold in our hand, put on the counter, stuff in the pockets of our pants. No one has ever explained it properly. I’m quiet. I try to explain the way the morning looks to myself. I’m silent. I travel through what I cannot explain. I’m a frayed rope of fire dangling. The morning blows at me. Parts petals upon petals. I am who I am, of the dust, fall to the dust an ember still burning. II. I look at myself, stand over the stone of my life with my great shadow filling in the cracks. I look at myself, I come into the stone holding Eternity in my hand. III. Golden Time sheds off its gold, rusted in its steel sleep, rattles and hisses in nightmares. Wherever we step foot we feel its madness. I am a shade dark nude forms undress behind. I look up and watch the shadows, and watch the shadows.
