Sundown

Comets and Saturn’s moons under Iowa cornfields, oh the beautiful ruins I lived in. Like the comets we were burning creations, linked by fire and violence.

The drama of transactions with the meadows’ fanged grasses: I said swallow me in so vast a darkness that I can’t contemplate the sadnesses I keep. Starlight scatters across the meadows parish. This is the oasis of beasts. This is where desire sleeps.

Madonna of the dark waters, I used to be a dreamer before I watched everything leaving me. Instead, the nightmares were screaming. In the company of swans carapaces, I witnessed my life ending again. The vengeance! of being! Mortality is a prison of nothingness. Sundown with the world in my mouth. Desire, the leashed beast—at sundown, I let him out. Steeped in black evening, the nightmares were screaming. Nightcrawlers in the nets. Breathless, the usher urges me before the cold orbs of oncoming trains. Prairie larkspur shadows the lakes. Floods soaked the Earth. The once slouching gods awaken to devastation. Genesis from the seas. I witnessed a storm of wings in the silver cities. Like the wild spring hyacinths dreaming in the nights, I exit time. What a pyrrhic victory: desire burned its wager of flames in me. Winged creatures thrown to the churning winds of arctic night. The desire for possession consumed me. Even ruin has a radiance, even the miracles have a veiled violence. At the threshold of God, I drown in the deeps. Requiems for the vanished of evening—Vespers stars, I rush into the rising light. The revelation of desire! in the eldritch eves! Oh desire— that once leashed beast —witnessed me beneath the clear stars in ecstasy.

Spring, I have arrived at your ruins, a ritual of fragile light. Spring, I have survived—I have survived—but I do not know why. Sundown, darkness lay across the deeps. The universe was Adamantine.