Ric Carfagna

from Symphony No. 8

(13.7 billion years)

As if to begin again

on day one

arid landscape

on day two

the room

is in shadow

and noon remains

in pieces outside

the icy latticed window pane

it is here

the glittery scrim

of Andromeda’s flame

eclipses a gauzy pallid night’s descent

and from behind lace curtains

Orion appears

a late autumnal fog

across the drab

burnished-grey anthracite sky

and to know

there is only sand here

sand to redeem

flitting through

the factory window’s

neon ethereal glow

sand to reflect

when gravity’s diminishment

filled a parallel dimensionality’s spatial void

and light from the glassy orbed satellite

bled into the opaque mirror’s

unseen interior edge

and it is here

where eyes remain

eyes laden

with drossy black snow

eyes drowned

in a theoretical ocean

deemed existentially unfathomable

and corporeally inert

“She said life

has no form”

the result of abstractions

made manifest

and fleshly reflections

in dimly lit hallway mirrors

and to glimpse this self

as isolation

or in the intimacies

of communion

is to observe

the dimensional angles of sun

the eye cannot intuit

from this plainer perspective

and to process

this image

as residual prescience

manifesting in form

like bands of a

winter-glazed

scarlet cirrus

dissipating above

a cracking asphalt sea

“she said we are

hard wired to perceive this”

cognition of the moment

is an entity unacknowledged

drowning in a grey

brackish unconscious scree

an aura of death envelops

the abandoned fieldstone cape

where light is recalled

as memory is

painted into frozen

garden corners at dusk

The clock does not

resemble a wall

in an exterior room

nor an etheric mist

freed from a molecular

sub-atomic bond

the clock is without

a vision of hyacinths

growing in the cleft of a hill

removed from sight

nor is it the author

of a petulant modernity

severing links

with an unredeemable past

it is outside

the little windows

defining reality

where disruptions occur

in the electron’s orbital plane

and the terrestrial rabbit hole

descends into

a superluminal dimensional realm

Scherzo No. 2

Dawn’s blemish

a floating mote

or a stranger’s eye

“it is here to interpret

the silence

as an ocean ebbs”

an open expanse

through a nightingale’s wing

in the solemnity

of the madman’s stare

“in this …”

a pendulum’s cyclical nature

retracting the optical lens

of malleable foci

hence the loquat tree

deep in scarlet meadows

the fragmentary

tunneling through flesh

dismembered

a distance

infused

a sinewy dross

a corruptible vessel

a light as Tyre falls

On a fence

a sparrow hawk

a deboned king

in the anonymity

of a mirror

a fetus choosing

an unbeating heart

a life-force

torn from a chrysalis

the girth of the sky

at sea level

an irradiated

forest of ash

falling into form

dilations of time frames

unable to measure

a ground fog scattering

light on glass eyelids

To observe

a vase of orchids

on a garden table

the sun’s angled gaps

fall through

the trellis voids

it is an observation

distant from the ocean’s edge

where stray eyefuls

of Queen Anne’s lace

disentangle shadows

made from layered phases

of cirrus wakes

it is an observation

of the limits

the eye encounters

in the unseen

sentient quanta

evolving within

untenable hemispheric voids

it is to see

the nature

of death and light

materialize within

the atomic nuclei’s

bond of seven zeros

where the entanglement

of indeterminate forces

appear as a radiantly transcendent bridge

spanning the ocean of centuries

which drowns the sedimentary flesh’s

bleeding torch

***

***