Of Progress and Implied Mission
I have not been broken of it,
as in the gash mending
the pink glass disregarded in breaking, yet I believe myself guilty
of small fractures, for without guilt over unwilled consequences,
what is man but a fall into infinitude, our questions unraveling
into the statement, “We choose
to go to the moon,”
a circular spot on the hutch surrounded by a pattern of dust
as though will excluded accident. I want the tree inside my lungs
to
expand
into a beautiful sentence, knotted branches growing every
which-way
and winning over gravity with strength
extending leaves thrust up,
as syntax extends the flow of ever-occurring words, hands, breath
lifted over power lines
inhaling the fixity of statement, the choice warped with age
in the recording, and what became of lunar tides after the moon
was
claimed
swelled out in song. The mind expresses
sun-glare through the windshield, a statement negated
with the negation of linear fashion, though time goes
and our bodies decay at a sophisticated rate
alongside the slow thinning of glass. And when I close my eyes
the moon vanishes as the world
caves in, wish of cars, soft
murmur
of the fan brushing skin, the image lost to internal, radial worlds
as the visual is disowned over rhythm, the stop of the heart
or a quick deception replacing a fixed set of terms with a walk
in
the park
and the inability of glue to bond
the halves of the glass into completion,
for the join captures light and it bevels. I am a face, hands,
arms, and composed
of bones in a corpse designated to breaking consideration
and as I walk I think about the many and vast actions possible
in
the soul, the air warmed with the end of summer but spiked
with what will soon be fall in the lungs, bronchial trees mirroring
the
skeletons of aspens,
the future embedded in the present, the rattling power of
self-movement, the nature of the
body
rather astonished to find its faculties similar to some kind of
stilled
heat.
-Karla Kelsey
About the Author
Karla Kelsey's first book, Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary, won the 2005 Sawtooth Poetry Prize..
