Chladni Figure
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What we or now they call graphics of gentle sand seeming

the street into this parking lot

with all the cobble is buried and

with asphalt too, catalyzed with worms in

arching near the treelines, obscured

decomposing edifice of forest

by towers of orange leaves.


Ingraciously the parking lot,

if not for the people it houses

itself a light thing

who orbit a particularly dense bridge,

dense not for mass but it is heavy with title

etch and carved into the

dark burn of a discarded name from

sheen-oil hardwood the rosinous

biblical characters or profession

reused in some other man who lives

probably three or so states away.

I orbit because I carry

myself heavy but not with a name that is dead or

of a dead man's but because I am set

in a recycling measured past lifetime

with an abundance of nomenclature

against numbers of people I have met

and with the dipole melancholia-by-tearing of longing

and the bridge heavy with not being

longed for—which don't mistake I am heavy with too—

of bridges and I

that the two, weighty collision

me and location, are

until I return home to coalesce. I know it is

not that crossing

that which pitch and yaw is beaming through

that is the elliptic focus of my motion

while it and I circle each other as we orbit the City,

itself a dense and begrudgingly moon-lit patch

lensing darkness among

surrounding lights,

the milk stars of the Hudson valley.

Only that the City itself is

weighted within field

of people; ugly loving haunted people and

that grid of nodes nodules points pustules

that holds hauntings our density of haunting in

that holds the refraction of the City, the prohibitive

which will not let the ghostly leave without

certain impossible haste

and our attraction or

that marks paths between wood bridge and myself

between two women from across seas eroded with

strange if sangfroid if not wholly benevolent love.


Then it must be there is nothing more soft and heavy than

figures of sand on the surface of southbound soundboard curves

pin-particles carrying our pitied aspirations I perhaps we rest still

looking out on lit windows in the City interstice from sheltered window

the stream shakes under the memorial bridge moves it thrums with passing

and I dream of the time when, by their gravity, all haunted things converge.

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