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Sky-mountains pile in piles,

Wide-rounded frothing mounds,

Soundless continent-collisions,

A slow and churning groundless vision.

See: the thunderclap, or cannon’s roar,

The streaming troops arrayed at war,

The heavens rushing on the earth,

All tilting, skewing, into the surf.

The wave recedes across the coast;

(a point)

Crystal fractals,

Crease-wracked, folding,

Noiselessly imploding, flowering,

Far-feathered warping, silent immolating.

(a line)

Dimensionality,

White bright-lights burn,

Nighttime churns unresting, yowl

Of yet-small yellow pinpricks in the vestige.

(a form)

Constructionation,

Machines build machines,

Unclean ulcers boiling in the maw

Of yellow-fire settlement, burning, upward,

Outward, inward, downward, unquenched fire screaming through the streaming gleams of unquiet blackforest flame, tamed, back and back, compressed, until the stressed beam breaks, the destined river makes, the all foundation shakes, the torrent overtakes, the great burning wheel crashes into crashes of its own design.

(a point)

This is the tune to which war-drums roll:

Low-mouthed groan roaring up then out of hearing;

Leaping out, over bridge, over lee,

Brokenly braying its burnt-battered soul.

This is the home hung with tattered blood-banners:

Wide-faced pleasant bracing from warm wind;

Lilies lie and daisies die in dull vases,

Small places, sitting-rooms, mild-mannered manor.

This is the hand which will gash out gore:

Kindly-curled clapping or clenching the key;

The tree-climbing fingers, the lingered caresses

Grey sky haze

Dazedly unfurling

Curling over roadways

Burning acrid skyplume smog,

An acid fog:

Dancing spiderlike over distant peaks,

Stepping smoke-legged down silver spines,

Blankly blanketing banks of steam,

Streaming o’er the earth,

Until we, haze-wrapped, fog-trapped,

A while back I wrote a poem which can be formatted two different ways, and rhymes both ways.

(1)

In time the sea will eat away the land,

And all the foaming fray will turn to sand—

Then pass away. This lonesome house is gray

To-day, and gravely slouches in the way

Of Neptune’s ceaseless, fierce decay of wave

And water, till someday it meets the grave.

(2)

In time the sea will eat away

The land, and all the foaming fray

Will turn to sand—then pass away.

This lonesome house is gray to-day

And gravely slouches in the way

Of Neptune’s ceaseless, fierce decay

Of wave and water, till someday

Invisible strings,

Threading,

Twining, inphysical, spreading,

Dangling down toward darklit dead.

Invisible things,

Groping,

Grasping, in the nightlight, barebones rattling,

Gasping for relief: to leave;

When oil-wells have swelled beneath the dunes

And plumes of ash have writhed across the sky,

When sulfur stains the soil yellow,

When acid rains,

When billowing boiling billows bellow

The thunderclap of Typhon’s rage,

When winds rage, in endless elder rage,

So will the age of life depart.

And all God’s creatures crawl into the boiling tar.

(Or almost, almost, for down the shore

A little wriggling greything groans;

He—it?—is crawling evermore,

Crawling for some sacred door,

Flailing cross the failing floor,

A brass-plated breastplate, half-sunk in sand

(It was heaviest, and thus he dropped it first);

A helmet, lion-faced, facedown,

A sword, a scabbard unsealed, scorned,

Crusting gently in the sunbleached morn.

Here we see his steps (they stagger;

Here’s his dagger, thrown aground).

Sand has swept over them. Now they are crescents

Soon smoothed over, soon still.

Noon will bring the death of him.

The worst of the heat, the thirst,

Defeat.

And someone might see a skeleton,

Submerged in sand, enveloped,

A Thing;

A thumping mess of flinging feathered fluff—

Paperbits and heatherscruff and wasted scraps of sound,

All balled about, all lumping round,

I came upon a shadow, well within a winter wood,

And on the shadow stood a tense and twisted oak.

And as the daylight broke and limpid light returned to leaf,

I saw a stone beneath and curled within a blackened bower.

Yet chest-height, raised as Antaeus from the earth,

As though entrapped, held in an oaken claw,

And I appraised, though knowing well my thinking’s worth,

That no principle could lift it there, nor natural law.

I seemed to see the breathings of an ancient youth

Still frozen cloudy in the winter’s air

As clambered he, perspired and hoisted it

To say with words he could not say nor hear:

“This Stone marks here my secret place;

Till time should condescend to save

My marker from the whirling winds,

Here I lie, a spiraling star,

Spying specks of silver cosmos in the vague and distant far,

Pattered points of light, containing Alls

Of other Everythings.

Forever ringing, sighing, spinning,

Globes of energetic sky.

I would trace an orbit there,

Would find a pleasant starcourse there,

Would smile upon the Everywheres;

Yet: my invisible, untraceable, insensible path

Is rounding onward, blind in motion,

And I revolve, though moving, frozen,

Borne on upon a static draft,

Wind-wrap’d laurel-wreathes,

Wreathing round in static frieze,

Burnt-color, blueblackbrown and gold;

The Old Wood, the cold stillth, aged,

The branches raged, devoured, sated,

The maiden who’s a beating heart within;

No more these eyes shall scathing secrets tell,

Succumbing to, a shell-shocked shell,

A numbing dullness, dumbing lull;

And She, who in futile vain implored

Sequester from her overbearing lord,

Shall find no safety in her wood-warped hull,

Shall forfeit freedom for impenetrable skin,

What colors combine,

Lime-green, seabrine, umber-red, jade-pine,

To divine, in a fine eye-line,

A greenbrown tree-spine?

 : A downmountain treeline?

 : A thunder-down-reaching-cloud?

 : A shifting shade-glade, a grave?

 : A heaven-rift, a thunder-blade?

 : And little frightened figures fleeing,

As the world, unseeing, swirls,

As stormcloud curls, light-berm whirls,

As shrouded furls of gunsmoke twine;

All still, all still, within the frame

Familiarface, bronzed;

Darkblue cresting waters rising;

Torch upreaching, unreaching, unlit,

Jagged sunstripes, bleaching,

Leaching steel from ragged steel.

Red-blue-green-black peeling down to fibers;

Higher waters, jolting higher;

The tip-o-the-torch, even soon,

Brownfeathered buckets wiggling inconsequentially on grey washlines over grey mountainfolds over dark pebbly seas; whirling;

someone left the brickhouse molding under billowblanket feeders on the knolltop; foaming;

on glassy dunes the clash of crystal coalescing; and as she sits, awaits her mother’s blessing, the seabird screams its sorrowsong above the turrets; friezed;

the battlements have broken in the seasalt; windless;

the endless crisscross roadways looming noways over hazycolored circle lights, red, auzure, purple-orange; sloweyed;

the palms have fell to rotting in the gravel by the sidewalk; skirling;