Call the Hammers of the Whirlwind

What tears away

like insect wings

inside the whirlwind

and peels like lead

between the cylinder

and the forcing cone

as the powder combusts,

the noise like mundane

thunder kills the silence

and perhaps something

more profound than that

within these shattered

spirits, fractured shards

no longer fit to hold

the heady admixture of our

hearts' blood, discarded

in the gloom of blown

bulbs and burnt fuses.

To fuse the burnt black

embers, bulbs of our

spoiled garden blown and

sent to gloom, discarded

lives to which we once aspired

with every dram of blood in

our hearts, admixtures

turned foul, heads held

within hats we can no longer

pretend will fit, and shards

of pain fracture at the temple,

temples raging with spirits shattered,

all within us sighing with the hurt

of finding all profundity

slip from our grasp, something

eaten by silence, killed with thunder

and combustion, leaving spent powder

and dust where we once had firm

handholds upon the shapes and gears,

the tubes and cylinders of the

mechanism of our world, the whirlwind

peeling the inside wings of our souls

and leaving us little more than insects

below the hot hammer of the burning sun.

By Patrick M. Tracy

About Science

The density of objects

activations in space

voids within them as

they spin, a thousand

invisible quanta

things only made real

by thought, by a sort

of faith that our

math can go where

our eyes cannot, that

our minds can transcend

what we can behold

But will we, sat at our

cluttered desks in ill-lit

basement rooms as the noise

of a water heater ticks and

a central heating unit exhales

its stale breath upon us--will

we behold something that can,

in any real way, transcend all

that our minds have always

guessed, or will we be unable to

go where the flawed calculations

of our mathematics gives way to

faith, to thoughts untethered and

unsorted, the quanta of our

dreams haunting us, invisible as

the ghosts of extirpated species,

just voids within that shared heart

we pass between us, that communicable

desire that arises from the void,

that unfilled and deactivated space,

that question - are we no more than objects?

Do any of our actions or assertions amount

to more than a tumbling particle within the

vastness of a cold universe?

Patrick M. Tracy

7/21/17

Somewhere Beyond the Wheel

A Haibun

The sound of the hawk’s talons as they click against the cement floor is sharp and crisp. The raptor moves carefully, head ducking, hard eyes scanning the empty and leaf-ridden floor of the abandoned factory floor. She studies the rusting press machine that once stamped steel into shape, her barred feathers shivering then going smooth. So effortless while in flight, she is tentative and shy upon the ground, hopping over the remainder of box end wrench. She hears the rustle of a rodent in the dark corner of the arching metal-sided structure, her whole body galvanized, her beak swinging unerringly toward the sound.

Exploding into the dim vault of the superstructure, the pounding of her wings echoes across the silent remnant of the production line. She dips, hearing the last, interrupted squeak of her quarry as her talons pierce it, crushing it to her smooth belly and bearing it aloft. The long, bright aperture of the loading dock door allows her to burst back into nature, into the tentative resurgence of sapling trees and brambles as they tear their slow holes in the broken pavement. The far treeline at the edge of the untraveled road allows her to disappear, to find a high, safe place above the ground. She holds the rodent against a tree limb, her beak partially open, her breath coming across a thin, pink tongue as she prepares to duck her head for the meal. There are no more white, crossing lines in the sky, no more strange drones and humming. The raptor doesn’t think about this, doesn’t reckon it. She simply is, the tip of her beak red now with blood.

Echoing empty

Ghosts of manufactured things

A song long finished

All the timid things

Called back from far horizons

After titans fall

All these mighty works

Just scars upon the darkened

Immortal beast’s flank

Where travels the wind?

What use, these songs, long ended?

Words, with none to read?

Patrick M. Tracy

6/20/17