Arsenic Lobster
poetry journal |
Issue Seventeen Summer 2008 |
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Our Lady of Translucencies Jonathan Reeve "The visual realm is not, as we'd expect, made up of distinct places and things, but rather a series of overlapping layers in varying degrees of transparency." -- Aristotle wherewithin slivers of silver fish glimmer and an entire phylum develops as weather, your slender signature on a diaphane of stained-glass peacocks. where the air tastes of celery, your slippery stare like light from crepuscular quartzite gleams. your discotheques of double eyelids bloom in the O2 of new sakura. you, youngmother of slow departures, hide not behind the mellifluous, but braided into it, trapped happily in the cryptomnesia of crystal, not adorned with halos but articulated from them, a whish through thickets where grass forth the freckles of tree frogs, where all the penitents of the plant world bow in translucent surprise. it is time, while we are still young, for rice wine, pine and the broth of a new moon. it is time to gaze into orreries as into the ointments of eyes. your diffusing visage hides behind the last veil, but there are infinite veils. your aquariums weep etherous anesthesia and cause a mist the sound of which puts all the mice to sleep. your hair, thin fishing line in brine; are your lampshades my atmosphere? in the tinsel of a curdling verdure your pale lucidities shimmer apparent. in virga, in vitro, in the paper skins of onions, you flicker like the films of the brothers Lumière. after closing time your thoughts manifest as glowing smudges in an old dental X-ray. I read you drunk through a glass of wine squinting and sober through monocles that are not my own; let us sing to you with ululating uvulas and the gloss of glossolalia, like birds returning from the south, with voices that dissolve along sleek vellum zephyrs. is spring the congratulations of paper lanterns? are you the obsolete words used in whispered suggestions? you are not clear like water, but like sodium pentothal. it is only after you're gone that we see you, or, rubbing our eyes, we doubt we ever have, as if through ice swans or ladybug spittle. some mornings it's so bright that we can just see through lucid everything, and you and I broadcast steam from laundry rooms. you are refoliations of forest canopy boudoirs, you hold the secret that every little thing is lush at the right magnification. here we are, on the first bespectacled days of a great blurry melting, in the glass that is made from beaches and the churches that are made from beaches; here we are, from within a layer of lacquer in an interbellum eggburst birth, within the encyclopedic opulence of our overlapping fields of vision, the equilibrists of our own glissando. |
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About Jonathan Reeve |