Ravi Shankar

 

 

Symbiosis

One alternative to speech is wheatless streets
Where caught mid-impetus, even lampposts
Rusted cursive partake of flow:
This into that, shadow ceding mass, intake output,
Not headed anywhere particularly but particular
Nonetheless, the way the cracked curb
Appears granular in sunlight,
Both existing not from their own end
But in symphony with that which converts
Their presence into nouns, as if that fixes
Anything in place, root-sure with the necessity
Of clavicles, igneous rocks and thunderclaps.
With obstinate grace things slip name's knots.
A bright moth, lanced on pins of rhetoric,
Sloughs off tremulous meaning, even in decay,
Even under the magnifying glass' oblong eye.
Only a blossom can define proboscis.

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Marine Pastel

Chromatic waves of sound wash vibrations into inlets,
Shape the place bacteria emerges from with unasked
Pressure merging atoms into and out of ionic bonds
So that microscopic life can develop from tidewater,

Disputing entropy by growing more complex in time:
Voices from an ocean teeming materialize shell spirals
That spell chaos, brackish and baroque, unpredictable
In the form of weather, more habitual in retrospect

As limned in crystal or decomposing underground,
In medias res forever, temporarily inhabiting a succession
Of forms: watery squiggles, phosphoric roots, magma-
Parched craters that distill briefly into veins of thought.

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Shapes in the Wilderness

Beneath, beyond, away, other than,
The are who we are happens contrapuntally
To the observation of the are being.
Say you and I are flashlights that shining
Out from a clearing into the forest
Shape the forest, providing trees leaves,
Mulch moisture, vivifying what world
Would fit the light of our partial rounds.
Dense, multifarious, the dark wood
Has no essence but in fleeting swaths
Of light that in illumination, define.
The fact of the flashlight, battery and bulb,
Are the only a priories in existence,
Though we cannot know their constituency,
Being their constituency.

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bio/notes