Academy

Had there been trees present
at all those crossroads -- beautiful trees!
and green a parrot green known to us in those parts,
what would any desert god have had to do with us? 

But it is a tenantless sea rolling
ghostly waves which depends on us,
with the odd sight of a few denizens
of the land-speed world advancing upon
those famous salt-flats --

Summed lines of every progress teased-out into animated
ribbons pulling together shape, manner, and movement
clothed in a kind of luminous pearl, if not a watchful one. 

And our bodies like stark keels
frothing-up suds in advance of passing through
it
honeycombed
with exotic dimensions as it were.
Nonplussed once confronted by tiny entities such as these, we
chiefly desire to know them . . . to feel it as if
on our tongues, or within our fingertips!

“O, hold me in your arms a little longer!”
-- Welling-up, if detached from a freshet turning the old mill,
in advance of the spirit, which is breath, making words out of
phonemes clasping same together.

World in the heart of manufactured words and Sun created out of
smudged umber

touched in passing with devotional thumbs,
even as the sea welters away.

“Stay a little longer!”

Ghostly in the mist the factory seen from the edge of sleep
hand to mouth the words -- Even so,
Just the same:  adamantine in the teeth of
an ephemeral world. 

Listen for the conductor’s baton, a gray ribbon in her hair.

Glissandi of a hundred violins at midnight.