15
Clouds drift
above the asphalt palace's reflection
as a myopic subterfuge vision
entombs a bleating sheaf of burning parchment shards
it is now the past
the past
of a mindless geometry's
dissection of reality
a voided space of subtle negation
stealing breath
from the votive candle's
tapering flame
it is now the past
the past
of dust closing
the impervious eyelid
as the unnoticed stealthy cirrus wake
enters the sleeping torso's
weedy glandular dream
and here it matters not
to the mercurial faces
of grey elegiac anonymity
if day passes
into the diaphonous rags
of a sweating chemical night
it matters not
to the narrow-spined stranger
if a black linen veil
covers the sunburdened
concrete meadow's splintered edge
it matters not
if a discarded sea
of limestone slurry
sculpts a sinuously calcified intestinal ravine
it matters not
if a carbon atom's unbalanced orbit
isolates time
in a frozen eye's
gelatinous oasis of sleep
clouds drift
it matters not
26
It is not the fate
of the undefined
observer
to retain the mutable
aspects of matter
lost within
the calcified eyes'
frozen gaze
nor is the essence
of the dead leaf
a knowable ontology
to bestow upon
the terrestrial denizens
of an unlettered poverty's grasp
here there is the negation
to explain
the loss within
the angular mirror's
petulant faces
or in the archetypal
promethean ire
hidden at the ferrous dawn's
internal edge
here there is the rusted penitence
of hard-tack obeisance
and the elegiac wheeze
of the ivory-throated sparrow's
liquefied dirge
and here there is
no onyx ghost
to inhabit
the tractable specter
of evening's fall
where narrowing
fragile aberrations
infiltrate the celestially radiant
anthracite glaciers
receding behind
the dust-knitted
quantum veil
76
"Dear Mr. Schrodinger"
your feline lies within
a linty coffin's
quantum oblivion
within a darkened cognition's
gilded-iron reliquary
it is an entropic mote
in a blinded azure eye
a ghosted presence
scouring an inner cranium wall
it is one less voice
scribing its attenuated resonance
in a catatonic beholder's
tawny closeted dawn
"Dear Mr. Schrodinger"
there can be
no sacramental mourning
for an observant mind
accelerating into a chthonic oblivion
or a wincing pound
of quivering flesh
swimming an isolated gauzy existential sea
thus
you have raked
these medieval plains of gurry
you have stretched
this bloody torso's impermeable rind
you have frozen
the eyes of narcotic sages
you have bled dry
the verity from apocalyptic omens
you have erased
the slate of equation-bloated trolls
and here
here you have seen
the nullified ciphering
of myopic gods
the hermetic penetraila
breathing life to the alchemist's corpse
the dying light
from an terrestrial forest's ancient fray
and you have sown
the eternal orchid
in a ivory tower's barren steppe's expanse
Ric Carfagna is a poet and poetry reviewer from Boston. He now lives in rural Massachusetts with his lovely wife Mary and daughter Emilia.
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