AQUATELOS A Thesis Presented to the Faculty ... - Cornell University

1. EXHAUSTION
drags my symmetry down and apart into long ragged rockfaces
and my mind rolls a little in the col where it’s settled.
Wish I had a friend like Sisyphus who never sleeps but scrounges
for minds like mine to push up above the cloud cover
where it could get the stillness and sun it needs to soften
enough for me to get my eggtooth through and dry
my cramping wings in the dead photonic wind until they turn clear
and sweep up stray spectra to toss willynilly as rainbows
on the unbelieving earth. It’s cold, cold, cold goes the sycamore season.
Ladybugs conceal themselves like assassins behind the blinds.
A platoon of seagulls arcs in, a promise there’s liquid water yet
somewhere, not just this slag of glass ladled on the brisk hopeless bushes.
Or maybe they’re the last, refugees from a natural age. We only admit
so much. In Hokkaido, the Ainu say the lovers would be walking the dusk
down into night, and a freeze might snap the spines of hapless trees,
crystallize their sap, cause them to explode. Splinters tallied thousands
of killed dreams. And here I meant to write about myself, my long
slow self-killing through the deliberate isolation of dreams, and I’ve gone
and turned out there again, where the dreams come from, the steady stream
of pulsing wave-particles, nicks of light dancing between being and antibeing,
the laughter, the abandon in my son’s eyes when we open a new book,
the endless waterfall of joy hammering on my knotted shell
here at nadir, the deep and still cavity I chose for its soundlessness,
its lack of anything but myself, where I wedged in and rock a little
uncomfortably
from time to time, trying to get some rest.
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