The Prime Mover

The room is permeated in blue

since it was painted in blue, so in the dark

the very space between was iridescent

blue—the empty placeholder between

the computer, my face.

It is night and I feel a sky

even in that space, a yawning wind before

a storm like a grand maw inhaling.

My eyes focus on nothing in the visual

field but the fields, they multiple under

an azure sky. Winter fields matte white,

fresh snow down to a calm body of water.

Circles of sound hit me from fields foreign

to the moment. Cat’s claws on the carpet.

The CN freight-line moving north. Music.

Indecipherable music pulling the blue

out and replacing it with gray. Nightshirts

splashing on the line against a moderate

wind, the sky a diffuse gray-white with no

clouds uniquely but for one mass cloud.

Mass cloud drifting into the gray grass

matted down by winter weather down

to a flat sea, boatless, flukeless. 

I pray hurricane. Abalone. Razor

clam coursing with seawater.

On the scrub dune the scrub starts disappearing

leaving that barren more barren. It’s a start. 

A Specific Memory of a Pleasant Moment in a Previous Day

You’d see similar illumination going

through a dark field, but not in winter, in summer.

Not in winter—the incalculable joules in snow,

giving an equal undiscriminating clean in the cold.

In this estival dark a bright fester of incurable rotten

joy, a hole, a plot, a pit trap.

Flares like firefly in field.

Flares, the crypts of Epicureans.

A ghost in the night. A Mark Rothko.

Such simple radiation, memory.