Columbian

Columbian

by Jonathan Falk

Sanguinity on the short and railed floor, hawser, clear light of the river grass and front window.
Face of rock, o'er-run in grey water, gathering and mossily pulsing. Tin dipper, tapping the draught into which three stars fell. Rain, waves o'er rocks, the rise and receding of the lustred rim of the deep; blue return. Furrowed metempsychosis. Five limbs, the cast of maples, headless and unbacked dimension.
Spoiled and burnt rise, sloughed ridges, pumice shoars, apes, channels of broken ash. The vacant thrones and icy recesses of the gods. Glyphs lined on the coated walls; collapses, and chthonic dubiousness. Rattlesnakes, and the seal of a small foot. Stacked where the light becomes indistinct, sheets cut and drawn in from the cave, displaying in cross-section prehistoric forms of life, such as a tiger or snapping turtle with long neck and lambent mane, and delicate and flowing organs.
Lupine closure, banked snow. The seething of the mass and form, and ascent.

ca. 1990

Illustration: a small scale copy of Evening Landscape with Two Men, Caspar David Friedrich