Desert

Ground covered in quicksand. Burial, consumption, and newly exposed surfaces. Every place already seen. Loss. Astonishing silence. Sinking into a golden ocean and the hourglass of the world. Sunrise on the dunes. Books. Gazing, abandonment. Solitude and exhilaration.

To thee, the world is like a tomb, / A desert’s naked shore ¹

Reverse Tide

Blue wings panic,
darting
in arcs,
trembling. The plane cuts across
the low-hanging,
dense
star clusters
floating below.
The cabin hums.
An orange line on the wing simulates dawn.
Dawn crawls toward
the black lake.

The full moon
bleeds open
heaven’s mud.

Filed

“The fate of a unicorn in the desert is…”

The unicorn looked at me. A flash of light surfaced and vanished in its eyes.

“Filed.”

The unicorn drove its horn into a crevice in the rock and jerked its head upward. At the moment its gaze met the sunlight, golden blood surged from the fracture. The blood overflowed the dam of the sun, seeping into the endless sand-sea and the cool shadows. Then the unicorn collapsed entirely into the gravel.

Set

Set charged. He split open his own face with a sickle, and his face became a black shadow. I angered Set, and Set shook the earth with every step, cracking stone and soil. Set seized me by the throat, tried to hurl me from the world. Set heard bass notes and weeping, dropped me, and chased after the stars. Set had no regard for me. Through the sunlight I saw Set’s silhouette: a warrior, a murder, the shape and sound of storm. I threw myself onto Set’s spear; the spear passed through my body; I drove it into my spine. Flame.

Song

“Here there is desert and heaven.”

Dandy took out a radio and sat on the ground. He pushed a cassette tape inside.

“Now, here there is desert, song, and heaven.”

His metallic eyes turned, then looked at me.

White Sand

A blade cuts through a pool of collapsed white sand. Gray mud
says: the only way there is to drift. Your ears
fall silent… crimson stains the smoke before the house, two stalks of white hemp
collapse indoors.

I say I’m so tired. Night
tears at the battle inside me. Your lungs
go numb… no one dispenses the privilege of breathing to us anymore.

You cough terribly, cough like a bronze bell cracking.

“Is that a power line pole?” You drag your frail body,
pointing at the black cross in the fog.

Wind
nearly grinds the proven notes to powder.
I run ahead, shouting, answer me.

Black Inanna hurls
the burial mound to its death behind us.

I
pick up her severed-nerve-like wires.
Turning back, I say:
“Over there is blindness.”

White sand swallows winter.

Sinking Ghost

Lie down.
Outside the window scatter
those cataractic drops of gloom.

A spider lily of blood
trembles;
February has died of overwork.
No need to produce
more words: the word-wall is already built.

Night flees toward
the furnace.

The dark cloud spring
pours down;
the falling ones
copy from memory the pupil-color of the setting sun.

Compound Eyes

Thoughts condensed into sculpture, placed on the display shelf in the vestibule, maintained by dust and gazes.

A moving, dark gray, undulating face-sculpture; every pair of eyes watches the viewer.

Moving like tides, overflowing, receding, resolute as maggots.

It Rained in Los Angeles

It rained in Los Angeles. In my fragmentary impression of it, it wasn’t supposed to rain. I had always thought its sunshine, its unpolished sea and sunsets, the palm trees rising beside buildings, all came from people who had long since stopped caring about anything, people who could reach out and get burned by the sun. But it really did rain in Los Angeles. And so the city’s face drooped, playing dumb, tossing out the dark green hidden deep in its heart, cracking its heart open.

Remaining Rusted Things

Ancient Fish

It was massive as a hull, mottled with rust, its lower jaw jutting forward, its mouth full of thorn-like teeth. Its body was ancient and hard, both ends tilting upward, the belly sagging in an arc. Its bottle-cap eyes had no pupils, simply placed there in solitude. Its two fins, compared to its body, looked remarkably fragile and thin, somewhat like petals. It was missing its tail fin; the tail ended in a blunt, rounded point. The heraldry on its body was complex and coiled, reflecting faint light; the light spots moved from gills to back, emitting a sizzling sound.

Passenger

She thought she was probably about to fall into sleep. One misstep could plunge her into a steep night. Why was there nothing at all in the desert? she wondered. A red light glowed at its tail. She could see it on the screen. Blinking. This was not the light of a planet. After a while, this light too went out. Ask someone how they fell into darkness and you rarely get a satisfying answer. Ask a middle-schooler what love is and you rarely get a satisfying answer either. But ask a middle-schooler about time and the sun, and you’ll always get an overflowing answer. Speaking of time, hardly anyone uses hourglasses anymore. True enough: who could bear watching sand drain away grain by grain until there is nothing? She wanted so badly to grip a dagger in reverse and hammer it against the sun, again and again. If you cut the sun open, would the concept of time cease to exist on the ground? All the episodic struggles and efforts would also reach their end. This vast world, before long, would contract back into a singularity.

Taxonomy

He had an innate love of composition. Manuscripts, archives, collections, categories. He wanted everything to be actuarially precise, carefully, thoroughly, infallibly considered. These records he kept were nothing more than a small personal fancy. In this person’s lifetime, the things that could truly condense his emotions were not many; writing was one of them. Rereading past writing meant reliving the state of mind from that time. This was one small step in his process of crafting that dagger that cuts open the sun. Insignificant. Not worth mentioning. Like the overcast skies of Shanghai. He attempted to compose his own existence. This was a primary part of how he presented his being to the outside world. People’s communication and contact would depend on this composition.