Distant stars overhang piles of rubbish. The light of dust, the remains of a shade.
Like every detail in the dark, it only suggests what it is.
The sun comes to take the trees. It shows many things: the buildings asserting
their plainness; the legible grotesqueness of the world.
I have kept my garden, a puzzle from which there is no escape. I notice a distinct
now. I perform acts of here. I put it like this because no European language can
express the idea of permanence adequately. Every moment is, by definition,
momentary: hush, hark, then curiously vacant.
I imagine such noises as any ghost would. I distinguish between fatal sounds &
those which are not. The amazement fills me like buckshot—that is to say,
scattered all over. I float in patches & take an interest where there is no
conceivable mass.
I hope that there is no other Earth—a place to make dull the pale green shine;
a place to make steadily creeping oceans. How slowly these thoughts come.
Suddenly, then not at all.
Earth lurches forward. A star dies an incredible death, so swift & sudden
it takes forever to notice. As a candle, it is not a problem of addition. I think,
as some do, of the insufficiency of the moment. I admit that, were I to discover
a cathedral, it would never be enough. I remember corners make a house.
I try to find two walls.
—Douglas Luman
Douglas Luman is Production Director of Container, Art Director at Stillhouse Press, Head Researcher at appliedpoetics.org, a book designer, and digital human. His first book, The F Text, will be available from Inside the Castle fall 2017.
Copyright 2017, Douglas Luman