The Oracle Rising From Porcelain

with sheets of water outlining the form that she has taken.

This, then, is what I circle
snuffling and snorting and breathing much too loudly,
and that circle returns upon itself
until I am able to hear the sounds she makes and then
the opening,
abrupt and pungent,
when this brain and that gesture collide.

Too often now, when I try to talk or write what’s happening,
there is a loss of language and
there is a fumbling for vocabulary and
it all falls to foam ungently as failure.

Again a circling, like a dog in mid-droze meanderings,
as I fight against consciousness and its tired messages.
A struggle down, a struggle toward
that hole of revelation where things are as the should be,
are as they are to be supposed.

A blind animal, unearthed,
and wishing for it to rain and then to not rain and then to rain again.

Heroes of Language (Part II)

My grandfather told me stories about his friend, an Indian named Enchanted Medicine Dog, and it wasn't until I began working in the library that I was able to guess that his old buddy had been the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse.

My cat is named Pencil and it has recently become apparent that she actually wants to write. Her scrawlings, from stylus held most clumsily between paw and tooth, cannot begin to yet be called language, but there is a meaning rich with feline sensibility and a kind of creeping logic there.

My fish, lock in their glassy locus, have taken to strange loopings that, when traced with soap slivers or grease pens along the aquarium planes, reveal alphabets or perhaps pictograms that point to icthic futures.

My wife, when sleeping, groans softly and runs her hands along my scalp to trace another man's name there.

Echolalia

All these are shock waves
and they disturb my surface,
all bangs and rattles
infusing the gentle soup
surrounding my brain.

Turning rings from wheels from
hoops of silent grammar,
blindfold crawling again and again and
the pinprick gleam of quartz a beacon
toward a rising syntax hidden
lost in the dirty corners of my house,
a falling away of verbs and of action.

These lips and tongue
fold themselves with increased looping
across the boundaries of new vocabulary,
a color emerges from its own new name,
rediscovered correspondence is translated and aligns itself
to order along a still wet alphabet.

In a sun flooded room west of here
I will sit with wooden matches
and scratch each to flame
until the box is empty.