Clouds and Flood

Spend all energy on what you fear, you broken rapturous fleeting thing. You try to bestow meaning and the pram falls over, the baby you spent months and years on turns into a plume of colors and goes away, for good? You don’t know and can’t. Every broken thing is born, vice versa too. Your eyes are knees. You fall on them when awe takes you away to an ocean of wonder, of regret, the oceans of so many thinks. Clouds in your vision are as hard as slowly spinning stones, they geode open like books as rainglass falls into your drinking cups. You try to ride away, but your hands make mud as you crawl into your bed. You thought it was the road. Here is the blank page, that makes woe something to get around, into something unafraid. Is woe afraid of you? You look to the soil, to the box you’ll be burned in, to the spare decorations on the pine, tiny hash- and burnmarks, birdfeet on the outside. Inside, unseeable, are symbols made by a carpenter’s hammer, hard to make out in the zero light of ground. You will not end in the ground, but as ashes on the sea, drifting down from mountains, reassembling a world from nowhere. A dog squeals when no one whispers. These meditations, these retried phrases; you retire them as soon as they make it to the world, this broken ball’s paper pocket. Then a vast suchness, a knowing of numbers, brimming in reedy retinas, all gone and full of open phrases. Brackish arms come up from bogs, pale and grasping for your face. Transparent, you see them before you are born into the flood.