It is not a mirror, but some
Shadow of a former friend
Whose exact conversation
Cannot be guessed, though
Sometimes its voice is familiar
And surfaces rather reflective:
It says that a black and nacreous orb
Has a white mustache like a bat
Which elongates sometimes at the
Tips, lightning bounces
Off the stony night.
Deep in the night, there is also
Another bat of clear gelatin
With lightning instead of blood.
This more archaic bat now
Carries in its mouth
A black fruit, a plum
Of holeness.
As daybreak surely comes,
It comes through the opening of a
Hat, a wet and orange admiral,
Whose brocade of six salamanders
Intimates a broken sundial,
An initiation before static
Unyielding interrogatives.
To walk the plank
Becomes the only option, dodging
Here and there tiny crimson mushrooms
Grown from fuzzy cracks, the explosion
Of language’s coding machine, a rooted
Food but not a plant. The plank
Is an endless ribbon. It is not
A mirror, but some salamander
Of black pearls wearing a clear
Gelatin Admiral’s hat, the small
Mandala of lightning a badge
Like a vestigial eye whose ceaseless
Unblinking presence is the spacey
Placenta of unity’s narrmony.
Deep in the night
Black salamanders
Surround an obsidian orb
Stand on their hind legs
To taste the nictitating silence
Of the fetal atomic choir
Valenced
Before a mystical
Equation
