Black Flakes
In the dream the man falls but does not drown,
coaxed from a bed of white pine needles,
shocked and late in winter air.
The man is no more than a ghost stripped from aspen
or cherry, flensed in a carapace of umber leaves. We see him so.
In the dream he falls through the tinnitus of rain
like a black flake. Some calm precise shadow
below in this lungful of forest silence,
like an idea of pressure solving itself in breaths.
We hear the days in white mist.
We hear the stigmata of oak in their long untidy creaking,
making of place sifting and failing. Years ago,
he lifted his hair in wild rage in the bloodless archipelago.
Now we find our mind weathered on his fall as the tame shanks
make their studious journey to earth.
There is no disdain. No pains or shoal of fact.
The mushrooms hold their tiny battles in wet jealous dens.
The ferns collapse into their own miasma. The man repeats his fall,
pushing through branches, leaving his torrid humour
in the dank reticulation.
In the dream, the man sheds ten thousand memories of skin.
He sees the trains and the spiders crossing the deserts.
He sees the cities rising and their tidy altars ferrying rains
up to the monsters of the populous. There is no let up
it seems. His eyes like eggs in the clinkers of his face.
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