Standing
by the ruins of a civilization
that shimmered with skilled masonry...now dark shapes rise over lost conversations, heaped
like a plague of phonemes dying under siege:
tongues thicken from fantasies of future excavation, air holds
its breath.
Where does
imagination begin? What signal fires a people to dream of a
place that doesn't yet exist, drawing out, shaping a forest
of symbols that began a thousand years before Pythagoras, in
the geometry of the dead, a vision that leaps synapses for the
pleasure of a thought? Extinction was not a concept yet, erosion
a missing event in defense
of economy and socialized
tropes.
Stealthy figures reconnoiter land whose
parched lips sign like an ancient bell pealing the sound barrier,
healing itself into mutant changes from agonies hewed too deep
for analysis: a trail of cockroaches
winding through a mimicking legend of sand....
to
Beautiful Town, with the intimate presence of myth
swept clean of teratoid shadows
and aberrant biologies the breakdown of cordial spaces, maps
of misdirection tracing roads
engineered so straight dreams would get lost.
Changing Woman,
her womb an evolution of riddles inspiring chemical codes to
stand as potentially isolated puddles the desert quickly absorbs.
