Sans étoiles redux

I love this poem and yes, that is a narcissistic sentiment.  It forms the last of a trio I composed in the midst of some incredibly heavy personal shit a couple of years ago that began with the stellar other and ran on into over the main.  Those two are still too harrowing to me; this one is a salve to them and something of a resolution.  Verse can seem so ordered and watertight but I assure you that its creation can also be deeply cathartic and profoundly therapeutic.  If you are ever dealing with something that won't budge, switch your brain to its most oblique channel and let it all fall out onto the page.  It doesn't have to be good, whatever that means; beyond a certain point verse resists all meaningful measures of quality anyway.  You either relate to it, or you do not.

I put half of sans étoiles together mentally while standing on Back Beach road and watching the full moon rise over the peninsula, grateful for both its private associations and impersonal eternity.  Posting it again in honour of the supermoon and lunar eclipse that falls on my birthday, neither of which I will probably see for clouds and hemispherical cockblocking.  

Thanks, Obama.  

sans étoiles


freed of an expired horizon reason tires and lies abandoned
warm gold wreaths the glowing round and
wordless I am sounded

rise and sleigh along a starless spine
sightless idol
sable cradled hueless eye
divinity entailed, interred in intimate affinity

override the pole
retire in silken sullen swallow blue
your hollow mirrored and allayed
remains arrayed upon
the faces of the faithful and enslaved.

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