Dan Raphael
Skin of Glass
surface that can be removed creates the problem of defining
what's underneath, having to go there to find out,
having to get the body involved, risk the senses, waste time
at least in cleaning up afterwards, in refuting the claims of others,
submitting to spectroscopic analysis, finding experts in
animal/vegetable/mineral icons/remains/signatures
no skin but a seed, not a seed but an entrance, an entrance i cant fit,
a new body i must-- a probe, an extension,
projecting several feet from
my skin my spirit coheres as a lazy gelatinous rectangle,
not what its made of but that it is, bigger but not more,
encasing more space not fed by molecular transmissions,
lacking the antennae to receive,
through the membranes where something meets nothing,
where meat sums not, things not, if so energized,
or shelled by that one way accretion of filtering all i'm capable of
like a song in one key in half an octave in four-four time,
a song that goes for fifteen minutes and can be repeated verbatim,
a song you can hear twenty years away, on your ship to who knows,
one technology racing another, hollow god-body-tree
filled with too many fish with refugees with poorly tanned furs,
an encyclopedia of non-seeding plants, spores in pores,
moisture interrupting everything, thinning defining
making the colors run, keeping my feet unsteady,
water trying to get back into my eyes,
wanting to make my brain a chalice
the hull is our roof protecting me from the rain below,
the rain that mostly cant escape,
is sad amnesiac content,
salt is its gravity, fish are its wardens, its fantasies,
flying fish and diving birds, walking catfish and aquatic mammals,
huge subterranean pockets of symbiotic fungus
displaying the colonic intelligence of ants and bees,
rocks that appreciate their own beauty, molten substance
that can neither be defined nor predicted, where heat and pressure
create the same relativistic curves as speed and gravity,
the big bang is in each of us.
the periodic table is in each part of us.
the pantheon of buddhas, sattvas and boddhisattvas
are waiting around curves of the brain,
which is not in our heads but in our hearts,
which are not in our chests but in each molecule
unfurling to the sun which is not in the sky
but everywhere
at once
but waiting to explode and scatter
waiting to implode and disappear
too constant/ sealed/ continuous to wait or change
be or not
a star a collusion of energy deprived of space
a matrix overpopulated with energy
Copyright © 1996 Dan Raphael
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