For Hannah;
I go looking
every morning, for the clearest view; for that
clean contrast between the greens and the blues.
I go looking on hilltops and riversides,
atop tenement buildings and trailing the gutters
through the cities and the towns,
to the thatched roofs of true, archaic beauty
surmounted with ancient waste.
Clarity reflects when, enrapt,
eyes lock on some impossible feature
of minute proportions.
And then the ink of pens bleeds into my irises
and turns to white-yellow trailing red into milky seas
of blackness.
The clatter of keys drowns the birdsong,
and conversations and the rattle of train wheels shaking
the true metal of one’s own clarity.
And the fog comes rolling in,
rolling in shrouded words
in thick black strings coiling,
in thick black strings falling
down the whiteness down the blinding purity
down the Heavenly earth turned Hellish in the mind
and the eyes more accustomed
to their own obscenities.