Destinies are forged not won nor found
but charted (knowingly or unknowingly)
studied & built or delicately peeled away:

light comes slinkily pressing wakefulness
on the present: to see & to make see
to seek clarity not by reduction
but by revelation by discovery:

beauty calls out to be cultivated
in human experience: so that life
enjoys & becomes & enjoys becoming
its most noble expression:

we “make haste slowly” because
we cannot be bigger than what
we imagine time to be:

along with our conceptions
our aspirations our rituals distractions
svelte metaphors & abstractions
we are a coursing patience:

aiming to take every moment
into consideration to be anxious
& patient in curiosity at all times
to persevere & be constant:

while little vagrant promises begin
to be realized: thinking of voices
hoping for voices of our own:

we find the elegance of laureled writers
towering from inertia from the arc
of centuries impressed upon them:
upon us the preconceived abulia:

we see forbidden words they found
a way to use to exploit: the ever-
unfinished finishing: on every page
there is weakness:

that voracious human sort of weakness
that produces love hate law crime cities
moon rockets the apollonian code

of found exclusivity: the myth
of fortune the complex illusion
of disjointed gravitation: the chemistry
of souls lost in words

heavy with poorly disguised meaning:
there is weakness in every voice
always a quiver the telling
of a one-day pressure to fall:

the pages produce a delicate vertigo
like a ruffle of doves’ wings
swelling to meet the volume of thousands:

pages marked by indiscreet seals
urge the vague mis-step the fall
from a level where one is free to dream
to solicit of dreams a world:

even this world rife with voices
a circle artfully collapsing in against
itself a world soaked with postulates
& microcosms specimens of the larger

uncertainty: gauze of theory at every turn
tiny hidings big waves blindness:
the steeple chasing query: are we forgetting

how to see? the question of prophets:
we are absorbed we audit passively
devour the excess of voice in a great
hymn to devouring to being devoured:

to being as devoured as such:
we trim the jagged resonance
with the quiet of pages that flutter
against an interested palm:

to write away the noise
even as it learns to amplify itself:
the ink millennia inlaid into moment:

spheroid sopping introverted / fleet
the world keeps us unaware of its character
departs from us without any formal
good-bye or well-wishing:

a voice is wrought of mixtures
the grist long unceremoniously weathered
granular with desire & with a will
to encounter / to express compassion:

the voice both frames & undoes
the human form: makes a bath
of afternoon on cobblestones

warm with a coil of arches
& the distant sun over Salamanca:
the circle which so readily swells
also constricts unremorsefully:

how long would it take to photograph
darkness? would the image hold water
be valid in any acceptable way?
for that ink works better than light:

& that’s the project of this indulgent
& so rewarding burden this making
ink into light or light into shade

thought into flesh & music at last
into the breath of life: how do the details
make their way down through the cascades
& batteries of time to inhabit

the spaces of our selfhood? through some
special alliance with wind & water
their own immense incalculable patience?
gestures talents attempts at crossing

the gaping snows: explorations
of the fissures or altitudes of personal
import: fitting one way or another

into a rhythm of chimes which announce
the persistence of the details of graceful
human hollows: former worlds invested
with effort with thought with care:

the ruins that become the cornerstone
the strength of frail plumage
the unsubtle glue of the half-truth
that makes a mystery accessible:

everything if we think of it exhaustively
is about beauty: nature’s secret inclination
toward it / the same tilt that crushes it

drains it pours vitality away from
one locus of beauty to create another:
the synergy of discontents counting
the cost of an unplanned taste of joy:

with first light amid the clamor of birds
the question emerges: how do we move
from flower to fortress? & back?
& what are we bound to lose

along the arduous circuitous way?
artful incisions in armors that too-long
served as stand-in for trust:

the smallish roiling racket of birdsong
shows the difficulties are not insuperable
they are an integral part of the landscape
the goal as now it recedes behind a hill:

now the summit rises over our path
now it is obscured by nimbus
now the map shows one inch to victory
now there are 20,000 paces to go

now the fork in our way perplexes
now we ascend the slow-going slope
now we rest & seek food for spirit

now we are there & accomplished…

[From the forthcoming book, The Furrowed Glimmer of an Afterworld]

© 2004 Joseph Robertson
A COIL OF ARCHES
JOSEPH ROBERTSON
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