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

the inner, outwardly invisible division even in only one—
of this, I speculate, the universe came. Which means
I am an epicycle of nothing.
An epicycle of slim holding.
I am a shall we say spirit with some vague sense of dropping
and at times like—oh, this time as I watch the hawks
ride thermals against the fading rose of day
till they’re commas in the book-length sentence
of the sky, and I watch and forget I’m here or thinking of talking,
or that you could be listening, or even extant, these times
when silence subsumes me not unlike my blood encounters again,
a pleasant shore-wash that brings deep-polished objects
glittering to my skin, these times I believe what
I am dropping into is you, the better me,
not the penult nor the free upgrade, but the pilot
that is the plane that is the medium
of flight, flight’s most lunatic optimism about its existence,
alone with its necessary opposite but unburdened
of its difficulties with control, motiveless
and upwardly destined, unaware of victory
lived out through pockets of conflict,
abandoning, dropping, looping through its first pleasure,
every one of them first and threaded on the one line
possible to follow, point X to point X
with all stops between pulled, forests of throats
unblocked for finale that signals
incipience, a bracket lounging over sleepy
emptiness, catsun, the pinch that brings one back
to dreaming.
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