Why was I so compelled, that speaking those
words, I felt a shift—some tacit wheel
turning in the current of our lives?
I’m no mystic. Such visions do not heal.
I’m secretly bourgeois. Do I love you?
I want to be an ascetic—slip the rope,
step from the ledger of desire and rue,
leave little but a name, a fact, a hope.
From Siddhartha to Schopenhauer, all
nihilism keeps its counsel in the dharma:
Desire is the root of suffering—the small
and local truth behind this mantra:
Why was I so compelled, those words released?
A current broke. Something reversed. Or ceased.

There is the image that is removed
from the source: the room unmaking space
around a candle—the light denuded,
a breath withdrawing from its place.
Or the space around that breath—where we
hold our bodies in the mirror’s frame,
repeating some inherited degree
of mother, father—gestures without name.
To be inside and outside the room,
to be inside and outside our bodies—
the light does not distinguish. Assume
the eye returns to where it used to be,
and thought, unlit, divides what we are taught:
two bodies bending toward one thought.

Spilled wine spreads to the edge of my napkin
over the course of dinner. I confess
my wife has thirteen ribs—then I open
a third bottle as we compare traumas.
The gay waiter interposes his tray
with the indifference of a Greek chorus:
“Our most popular sin is the soufflé.”
An hour later, my red napkin could pass
for a thin sheet of venison tartare.
The waiter pours two flutes of Kir Royal,
palms the bill, then impatiently stacks chairs
behind us. You lean back from the table
as if you were Isaac baring his chest
braced for a father’s judgment.

The reeds give way. The footing turns to silt;
Cold takes the calves, the knee, the thighs.
The bank recedes; the center remains still.
A form goes under, circles multiply.
The surface splits, reforms. A clean design
of rings moves outward, thins, and disappears.
Above, the scattered light aligns—
no skew remains; no tremor perseveres.
A woman cleaves the sheen, a lucid cut;
the surface yields, then closes where it split.
Around her, freshened currents rut
what leaves her skin returns, unwrit.
If meaning asks for argument:
The surface holds. The rest is spent.

I.
The fountains lift; the plastic geese fall out of time.
Still water brings them back in line again.
Wind lifts the hanging moss; the red gazebo shines
then settles back from view, half-hidden.
A weight shifts in the hedges’ shade,
then jackdaws break—a unison of black;
the sun is crossed, then instantly remade,
as if the air itself had folded back.
Across the lake, a bird suspends itself,
then drops, the water closes where it dived.
No shape returns—only the widening swell
of rings, the water’s surface misaligned.

II.
The water holds. I stand where something sank.
My breath comes late, as if it missed a cue.
The surface shines—a clean and polished blank,
and I am what it will not give to view.
The sky repairs itself. The birds unmake
their blackness, thinning into leaves.
I feel the air forget the cut it took;
my body keeps what light retrieves.
The moss parts; the red returns; the fountains rise.
The geese resume their harmless, hollow spin.
I take my place beside the watching eyes
and feel the surface closing in.

He moves—the mountain tamped in fog,
the lake a blade laid flat and cold,
its ridge-line edged with ash and ferns
that scour the cut where water logs
its margins, where the light won’t hold.
Birds cross the sky in hooked returns;
their bodies score the water clean,
whose surface bends their angled forms,
catching daylight at the shoals:
stone to breath, breath to sheen—
he moves; the morning burns.

Four months will show the pupal form unfold,
a map made legible by careful light.
It opens into something faintly old,
a nearer cousin finally in sight.
It’s hard to mark the instant wind goes by;
it leaves no margin note, no signal flare.
You turn, and know it’s slipped beyond the eye,
its evidence dispersed in moving air.
A breath arrives—unhindered, cool and wet,
a brief concussion close against the ear.
It enters fully formed, as if already met,
before the mind admits that it was here.
Two blue-edged rings around a greener core
tilt, then separate—the leaf can hold no more.

She waited under the stairs, in the basement air,
where I learned to feel and see without the dark’s
consoling proofs, to know that something there
persisted, even when it left no mark.
She held me tightly to the ground;
I complied with duties she made known.
The secrets that she found
were laid on me and carried as my own.
I drifted to her daily, down the damp steps,
and found a love in her remorse—
a thing I could not find within myself,
or divine its origin or source.
There she lay in the old air, suspended quietly
in webs beneath the stairs, whispering to me.