Viderunt Omnes

Time of husks, of buried husks,

of burying.

Something lives in the gall but it is slowed almost to death.

Just before I crack it from its case,

it thaws.

I am bright with blood above the ground bright with ice

below the trees that mold the sky into its shape.

Back from the fields of dormant goldenrod

that mold the sky into its shape,

cup its convex swoops between forests.

And there is a place of shelter

and the brightness of the shelter matches the brightness of the blood

and does not darken it.

This shelter must be believed eternal.

I have seen the revelations,

looked them over like data.

Analysis and reverence are the same:

what other attitude places us at the edge of some truth

with such ginger earnestness we do not dare touch it with our hands?

How perfect is passionless beauty.

Now the world is post-revelation,

there are no more revelations left,

only this:

the days arcing longer—too slow to matter—

and a light between the crossing of feather-barbs

and the idea of a bird.

There are rules for growth—

axes, scaffolds—

but still it is always a transgression.

Beaks and bark sing of softer tissue—

Haversian canal and its wet core,

snowed-in cambium hefting its organum against the ceiling

until it thaws or cracks.

The ground is cold

with the solstice’s echo.

It is still where the gallflies wait.

The sky passes and layers

and the brain turns over in the skull,

lives on reserves.

It shifts with the moving of the body in the wind,

a tremor in sleep,

melisma of self.

Perhaps beauty itself is passionless,

but the heathen eye is full of wonder and wanting.

It sits next to the shifting brain,

and the brain is ferocious and inconsolable

as the geography it loves shifts out of the sun,

and it remembers forward

into the ends of the earth which have seen God,

or have seen geography swallow itself so many times

they have puzzled to the end of the question

of how to love something that cannot be touched again