Unsubstantiated Rumors

Certain worlds exist beyond the states
we measure, behind the gates
that stand between the wonders
and the plain, between foreboding thunders
and our ordinary documented day
with its clouds of commonplace parquet,
as suddenly around a bend
the forest grows, the hills distend,
the normal meadow magnifies
into lamb-like run-on skies,
overlapping quantum shoals
flooding through the blinding holes;
the sleeping pilot flies in rapid blurs
through collapsing pastel colors
and settles on a vapor grid
of simulated pillows, turreted
in spiraling vermilion
around the shifting long pavilion
of fictitious mist and space,
the atomic blue of airy lace
stereopticonned,
doubled by the eye and stunned
into a conspiracy of beams
by death, or dreams,
like my window’s current view,
nothing anywhere but snow and blue,
tiny rows of evergreens
that curl up cosmological ravines
in their unreal Gothic climb,
back hairs on the glacial spine
lit by deathly lights that spill
not sun, but gauze and chill,
set off by a wormhole sky,
too imaginary to identify,
faded and uncertain, the ruin
of an unattainable high curtain
whose private scalloped layers
are seen alone by frenzied airs
and rays, too overcast,
too air-brushed, vast
and monstrous to coalesce
with any human screen, but nonetheless
a feature of the wreathing light,
made real by every unreal sight.

February 28th, 2016