9 new horizons

9
When the cornermen arrive
beyond any reasonable ledge,
there is always a return
to the scaffolding of the mind,
guided by a single silken thread.

The world is then imagined;
from the confusing spin begins
the order of the web,
in a spidery quoining of reality.

8
She drops
into the endless,
floating just below
the lintel-between
what is and is not yet-
she waits…

7
From the stillness
comes a breeze, and
from the spider springs a thousand things
Instinctively,
she begins her circles
from the outer edge,
insuring, in the end,
after revolution upon revolution,
her returning to the center
of this purposeful design.

6
She begins as if an artist,
growing more and more concerned
with the trappings of perspective,
soon appearing an exquisite engineer,
moving on a well proportioned map,
she becomes a bold musician,
composing tensile melodies
in a frozen mosaic of
blood colored bug-stained glass.

5
With a squint,
the web grows,
like roads from common paths,
the wrinkles in her face
cast in place
the tendencies she has.

Sometimes the map
coincides with the edge
of the mountain,
but mostly its figure
is an attribute of the mind;
From the temple on the hill,
space is plotted and divided,
into an edge that draws no nearer,
a future that never arrives,
as a single point of view
radiates into nine.

4
She tells a truth,
in the angle of a storm
that collects the hillside
and its people,
beneath a common broken roof.

She also tells a lie,
in the making of this town-
in its temples, towers, domes,
and leaky steeples.

She entangles
knowledge with belief,
and in the individual mapping
of a universal mind,
she contrives a bridge between
the statue and relief,
and with a savage symmetry,
she reminds me
of me.

3
Here,
in the cellars of civility,
where the tornado whirls
about the widow,
Here,
where the child walked between the lions,
in the gestures of nobility,
High above the ocean, now broken
into streams of subtlety,

So foreign is the water
with no teeth,
the portent of the sea,
So distant
is the initial idea
from the mezzanine
of the bourgeoisie.
Here,
the pigeons gather
on an empty hand,
just the same as the problem
posture settles on this old,
imperfect man,
who ponders in the colonnade,
swatting flies away.

2
But then,
there comes a clearing,
from the mountain
of her womb,
when the spider is the species,
and the one moving in my mind-
when the oblique reveals
and inherent frontality-
from this infinite orientation,
comes the mood of meaning,

When the world and world
of words,
fall into a rhyme;
From this life
that she has woven,
and confided in me,
from this desire
to understand
a desire,

between these points
of wonder and arrival,

All is just as before;
continually restored
in the many verses
of the universe.
1