Long ago, who took the Opposites
and clashed Them together
shuddering forth Eternity
with pyramidal teeth
tearing Time into day and night?

I leave the asphalt and cement paths.
I leave my Ways aged with old answers.

Torn bits of myself litter the gutters
a bloody head in old newspapers
an arm, a watch with Time
crushed to the rack of its needle and glass.

Two faces of myself sunder space
my Being parts
my wounds are gashes of light and darkness
and on the shrubs that line sidewalks
my blood-dawn and blood-dark dries.

I look for myself in rocks
I study mud tracks and shades of turquoise,
ways of water. I am the jaguar,
my pad the calm in a hurricane of claws
in the dried woodbrush and loose feathers
of the past.

I smell my childhood in the brisk sweep of air
after the rain. Then I see the child I was. Among the leaves.
I call out to him . . . alone in the woods, afraid.
He screams at the jaguar.

He grows up on city streets.
Afraid yet confronting everything, wandering.
Then he is a man at his desk in his room
watching the rain from his window
tremble each leaf and we meet and become one.

I.

I cannot explain my existence.
                                                                                            Distance
gets darker and darker.
                                                                                                  Space
born to solitude, intestinal insides of cities,
its edges bloody as if torn from a whole.

                                We are without form,
linger over the abyss like a wisp of cloud
over the canyon in a breeze.

We break the surface
to feed ourselves, for air,
like a fish that leaves a swirl of water on top
then returns to the dark slime of the beginning.

I left Arizona a year and a half ago.
Someone left Greece, someone walked a city street
in Mexico and learned something new.
We all moved forward into something we knew
nothing about. There is no Time, Space or Distance
to hold in our hand, put on the counter,
stuff in the pockets of our pants.
No one has ever explained it properly.

                                I’m quiet.
I try to explain the way the morning looks to myself.
I’m silent. I travel through what I cannot explain.
I’m a frayed rope of fire dangling.
The morning blows at me. Parts petals upon petals.
I am who I am, of the dust, fall to the dust
an ember still burning.

II.

I look at myself, stand over the stone
of my life with my great shadow
filling in the cracks.
I look at myself, I come into the stone
holding Eternity in my hand.

III.

Golden Time sheds off its gold, rusted
in its steel sleep, rattles and hisses
in nightmares. Wherever we step foot
we feel its madness.

I am a shade
dark nude forms undress behind.
I look up and watch the shadows,
and watch the shadows.