the dark matter itself begins to suggest theories of chance; last
night i climbed a dream•cliff, bare-handed, single-voiced, the redoubt
casting its baleful glare on my efforts. shrieks & caws of the shrikes,
kestrels, ravens badgering the lemurs and assorted small mammals
all around me, a veritable panoply of gaia herself, self-satisfied

self-assured, anomalous. i paused to ask questions, aware of
the 2- or 3- or 5-degrees of separation between this and that, me
& them, awed at how small the magnificently vast world can be
when a word is breathed into life unannounced, unexpected, wise.
i pitched my tent on a ledge fronting a crevasse with no end to it:

its depth a dark secureness ensteeped in mystery, one i am not all
that eager to resolve but am willing to plumb anyhow — the last
light of my bestowed-upon arc of day already vanishing from my
wrinkled brow & into an early evening of some note, some calumny,
much anonymity which, at the end of day: my preferred modality.

i chuckle knowingly, certain that the reading of these lines, the
fall, fail, fallow, freak, flinch of these tokens will easily be parsed
{modulus 1} by the glow i am giving it to, itself a kind of dark energy
of that latent space of mind not easily seen much less understood
even by the high priests of its ambit, ken, & purpose. suppose i

speak clearly and simply; what then? in the listening is the heart
of a life, one shot through with ascendancies and fallings, rues
and failings, heartbeat and heartbreak, tempered joy, quiet faith,
love of a child not one’s organic own, silent treasures found, lost
& discovered all over again— the taste of a rare, mindanao, fruit.