Thursday, March 01, 2007

Shadows of the Gist

Turning,
turn the unleavened
shadows, as clock
gears mesh and
spin, as they
accumulate and
relieve their
tension on tiny
springs and
mechanisms for
which I have
no name,

turn the space
upon which we
come to exist,
come to refute
the idea that
we are linked,
coincident,
contiguous as
the nameless
parts of the
chronograph,
parts and parcels
of the interweave,
narrowly differentiated
elements of the
firmament,

turn the time
upon itself
so that it
flows impossible
courses, existing
as idea alone
in Escher-space,
on the inside
of a clear
reflective sphere,
providing its own
counter argument,
its own intractable
and constant
contradiction,

turn backward into
the invisible self
that has ever been,
the hidden gist of
things we cannot
quite understand
but feel so strongly
to be true, and
push the roughness
of a dying outer core,
of skin sloughing
from flesh and being
replaced—push the
wild essence of the
unguessed self into
the unmapped quadrants
of this terrestrial
cosmos.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I immediately realized that this piece needed to be read aloud. Smooth, delightful flow of ideas. I've already read it aloud twice, and suspect that I'll be reading it again and again. Very appealing to me.

Anonymous said...

Finding a Place in the Master scheme of things. A meaning for our being. Still desiring to be unique yet fit in in some positive way.

MB said...

You begin and end this with interesting phrases:
unleavened shadows (pondering this one eventually got me chuckling to myself about which shadows are bubbling with yeast... don't mind me, please)
and:
push the
wild essence of the
unguessed self into
the unmapped quadrants


Nice sounds in this one.

Anonymous said...

"tiny .. mechanisms for which I have no name"

In engineering there is a vast class of small things that seem best charaterized as "fizzouls". Oddly, I can't find this in a dictionary along with a correct spelling.(??)

Another good one.

Patrick M. Tracy said...

Doc,

Glad you liked the sound of it!

Bobby,

I think it goes like this: "I am myself, but I am also everyone else," or "I am who I am because who we all are." It's the Ubuntu concept.

MB,

I sometimes use "unleavened" as a stand-in for "unadulterated", but yeasty darkness sounds neat, too.

Again, glad to provide interesting audio, whether or not the sense of things came though.

Swiftboat,

Fizzouls? I love it! I'll have to figure out a way to write a poem just about fizzouls. Some techincal jargon is difficult to locate, but I'll bet Google can find something.

Thanks for coming over, everyone.

M. Shahin said...

"turn backward into
the invisible self
that has ever been,
the hidden gist of
things we cannot
quite understand
but feel so strongly
to be true,"

I have this feeling quite often! I think you captured the emotion of it very well, and superbly expressed. Also nice rhythm and flow of words.

Across Inconstant Breath

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