by C.J. Weeks
Studies of a Field #9
no wind / the thought of death
and wild senna
the sun opens the blue mouth of a
dayflower / being
collects into landscape / a mind
infused with
language / speaking / intelligible
the self outside
the self / the other inside the other
a mind stuttering
struggling to articulate the metaphor
of vision / to color
the image / fill-in the empty bits
call the picture real
Sonnet (High Tide)
Suddenly all is serious and wavering
in the brine. The level sea rumples with
melancholy thrusts.
Silence descends
like Satan,
too much in love with God.
A mad star, screaming light, burns truth
into dark—
mute murmur of the void,
nothing less than a whisper at the window
blending with the glass, suspended
in reflection and shadow.
Questions follow,
dropping like apples from a forbidden limb.
Signifier / Signified
Nameless worry
of autumn light
in the restive eye calls
out to the indolence
& stillness of things
(so much their theme
and empty space),
a question, a mute
prayer becoming
the visible (more or less
the world). A ghost
already, the thousand
gold thoughts of
a maple tree reach their
bright end, find the ground
after all. (Burning abyss,
the window’s clear mind.)
At the wrong time,
the right word stammers
into being (silence)
the way night
remembers a dead
star. Time, ruin
of a dead god, the body
itself, the only
thing left, memory,
a broken wheel. What is
solid dies of
its opacity, heavy with
riddles & shadows, the idea
of matter. What lives:
transparency of
the void (oblivion), the dazzled
medium of darkness.
Black point between
the eye & light—
the invisible speaks.
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