from Symphony No.11
…the inner recesses… (for Mary)
Ric Carfagna
I
This flesh breathes
expands and contracts
divining a place in the universe
outside the door’s lifeless shadow
the grey strata of clouds
rising in the east
and to touch this residue
which clots the morning dawn
an ink’s pooling Rorschach design
a panther of retracting night
shrouded in the forest
waking to wind through alcove windows
to plainchant echoes from atonal dreams
II
There is a point of beginning
of abstract generalities
of the solitary heart
amid an intermittent rain
of the stranger’s glare
in a room
where the doorway swings closed
and where the fate of Schrodinger’s cat
depends upon eyes observing
the degeneration of atomic nuclei
and the silent sentience
of forgotten lives
left on the cutting-room floor
III
She flames with passion
for the continents
unknowingly
drifting beneath her feet
an intimate geography
of substance and loss
of candlelight fumes
in the darkling eyes of crows
of a steel door revealing
an artifice of radiance
orchids in a field remembered
a rock wall understood
as unyielding emotion
the chains of flesh
the apathy of privation
and the slow bleed
of pain’s embrace
IV
And these hemispheres
interpret pain
in the unconscious organism
small murmurings
running in riptides
unblinking eyes
at a window at noon
an asphalt road
glazed in rain
a field of orchids
shrouded in fog
a heart beating
below
an ocean’s turbulent husk
V
The subterfuge
is this dark ocean current
is this bleeding statuary
with mute elegiac eyes downcast
is this slow drain of light
filtered down a corridor
of voices without meaning
of understanding so little
of what has not returned
from death
to be again
the progeny of dust
VI
Footsteps down a corridor
likened to wind through trees
to rust on winter steel
and to chains rattling
on closed doors
to windows and crows
lost in blowing snow
and to the ghostly mourning dove
hanging in high branches
droning of the empty womb
expanding and contracting
and offering its life
to a wastrel spirit
hovering
above desert wastes
breathing
the elixir of forgetfulness
taking on flesh
and sinew and bone
and eyes to see
the orchid bloom
bend on its stem
in a fragile evening breeze
VII
We have composed ourselves
in this girth of shadow-lore
where nothing comes of days
weighted beneath gravity’s emotion
where storms rage
through a mountain’s meadow
where wolves devour
the unspoken words
of a faith
lost through love
VIII
And when sleep enters these eyes
dissecting an ocean’s depth
it becomes a moment
of unconscious consolation
it becomes a Sunday
torn from the pages of childhood
where isolation glints on a rock wall
where orchids grow in a field at noon
where summer’s touch is a shallow breath
bleeding through dawn
and where death is a faceless prisoner of flesh
entering a house through a steel & glass door
and dissipating the primordial energy
at the atom’s core
IX
Sooner to have understood
illusion
the atomic structure
of the blade of grass
the density of the spiral galaxy
the inner recesses of passion’s labyrinths
and the dark flesh
of visceral shadows
when the bones of the sage
have returned to dust
…
and to follow these forms to fruition
without divining
a reality within
cubist hues which defy
their spatial relations to matter
abstract equations
resolving theoretical infinities
tares in a garden
where orchids once grew
and a solitary breath
absorbed in a molecular sea’s cresting wave
X
The argument of solid matter
collapses upon illogical interpretation
for the crow must dream
of spaces in the cathedral
where photons of light
refuse to follow
a predetermined path
for it was all once seen
then later forgotten
a grey veil shrouding
a sanctuary’s nave
a gauze from the river Lethe
drifted into the eyes
assuming an edifice
held in the rendered verities
of science and faith
…
…and the mind collapsed
into speculative revisions
…a wick tapering
and bending with the breeze
…a sun caught behind
an tenebrous overcast
…a womb embracing
a conjoining of matter and space
and breath dormant
in an amniotic sea
blood and sinew fused as one
sleep replaying
the theater of death
austere thoughts
in amphetamine darkness…
and nothing left
but fog and rain
Ric Carfagna was born and educated in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently, Symphony No. 9 (White Sky Books, 2013). His poetry has evolved from the early radical experiments of his first two books, Confluential Trajectories and Porchcat Nadir, to the unsettling existential mosaics of his multi-book project, Notes On NonExistence. He lives in rural central Massachusetts with his wife, cellist Mary Carfagna, and daughters Emilia and Aria.
