One In Two
Dan McCann
I
All this flowing into nowhere. Believing
The universe into being and the Nature of it
Springing forth from the same cold unity.
Nothing more mysterious than that.
And running
through the same pulse.
A distance with a rim
A microthinline
Folding up eternity into every cell of itself
And every point that�s really a plane
Engulfing
The geometry of the soul
The distant world beyond the dreaming.
II
Believe what you will
And Will everything and nothing.
If you could stop talking to yourself
For a mere thirty minutes
You could talk to God.
Or so the mystic says.
The odd thing is the truth
Another unity built of two
Another time built of space.
On a sea of motion.
A gulf of reason.
This happiness
A face in a window.
One Slim Volume
The psychological possibilities of ink.
Baudelaire whoring and writing poetry.
Forests, like cathedrals, terrified him.
He was a man in the labyrinth
of sense and heresy
crying divinely.
The ink and stain of letters
angels and paper
dreams and print . . .
A man in the gutter was a man still,
drunk or not. Flesh
a poem as well.
The Dreaming
We were told, and they were spoken of,
Dreams as nothing more
Random than fits of nerves
Lost in their own undoing.
Then what is it that finds itself alive,
Inventing landscapes and others,
Nameless, without speech,
But informing you in the meaning of that word,
From the inside out Reaching below
Patterns you couldn�t see
When eyes were lifted
Toward a summer, one of many
Languid days that turn like small tides
Over a landscape you were assured was real.
Not like this one where the hours
Have no seam of evening and
Everything becomes together, moving,
Rapid eye throughout the night
Holding its own thoughts
Which come back, a secular download
Of something you lived, a life
With no width.
Still Life With Fence
Cross-hatched in a winter sun
and showing through
long overdue coat of paint,
processed, milled, purchased,
nailed, and rotting, they all have shadows,
every board, warped,
casting one, no two alike.
Jade plants, leathered
old woman�s thumbs
for leaves, stand in front.
Bottlebrush where the sparrows go.
A euclidean fir that can hide nothing
in its symmetry, hovers above
two chaise lounges
napping in a slow rust,
from sleeping
too close to the ocean.
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