TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATION NO. 652
 
Awoke, the red horses of my dreams still galloping
On sand that splashed up miniature imitation 
Of the explosion of an atomic bomb when it hit the earth,
But in my dreams where the changeable dominates fixity,
 
The sand changed to cobblestones and the red horses
Were galloping over a bridge across Bruges's Lake of Love,
Their shadows darkening the white bills of swimming coots,
And then changed to concrete highway fenced in by billboards.
 
The red horses disappeared as they were replaced by red cars. 
The red cars vanished, but motor sounds lingered for a short time.
All of a sudden, awakefulness and silence and then a cardinal's song.
The non-existent noise that became an actual noise in dreams gone.
 
I concluded that the changeable, not the unchangeable, should be
Worshipped, for suppose, our fixity was the hideous sound of motors.


TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATION NO. 653
 
 Time's teeth bite the second story window frame,
Chewed up old wood and old now gray-haired putty,
A pane of glass that I looked through many times
To watch a mocking bird's throat a green mobile among chinaberries,
 
Slid out intact, until the light green border hit a roof pipe
To explode into flash of fragments, and roll as chips
Over tar and chopped up gray rocks to fall downward.
The broken pieces scattered over a palmetto frond.
 
Each piece in sunlight sent out gold slanting flashes,
Gold light that caressed and entangled with gold light.
I stood entranced, glazing at a flow of green and gold.
A leafhopper, gold and turquoise, crawled among the splendor.
 
I thought, if life had not thrown me to live in this decaying house,
I would have missed this intense moment of wonder.


TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATION NO 654
 
The bright red bell pepper upright stood, stem
Straight pointing up, upright on dark crimson
Tablecloth.  Before it, the crown-shaped top
Of a pomegranate bordered, dissected pepper's
 
Indented dark crease between its puffed out reds.
The scene completed with a transparent cut-glass
Vase with a poppy stood out in front.  The transom
Above opened to let in sun to solarize the atmosphere.
 
I opened the window, and from outsize was heard
The Carl Orff music made by insects invisible in oaks.
I also heard a dog shut in apartment bark,
And a kingfisher rattle as it flew over pond.
 
Untouched, except by wind, the door shutting out the earth and sky,
Opened and let in the invisible that rearranged the tablecloth.


TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATION NO 655
 
Waiting to cross.  What I construct from
The shape and blackness of this smear on concrete street
Was due to constructers constructed  in my corporeality
By a painting of Franz Kline.
 
My attention is segmented by the blockage
Of cars passing over, and there is much traffic
One car after the other.
So I watch an appearing and disappearing work of art.
 
The way the darkness of the shape swerves and leaves two holes
Is accepted to be felt and explained by the silence of neurons.
Inner ears can hear what is not said,
And suffused me with a feeling of companionship and joy.
 
I am often so entranced by this work of art on a concrete street,
That I forget to cross when the light changes from red to green.


TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATION  NO 656
  
Concealed in reeds, their long brown oval blooms,
I heard eternities that were unstructured and amorphous
And were temporary, although similarities and approximations
Would be repeated and repeated.  It was a wren's voice.
 
I knew this voice, its self-containment, individuality beyond
Human comprehension, its alterity, and its openness would be
Heard, misheard, deeply experienced, overlooked by others.
But during this duration, it was also the wind, shadows sunlight born.
 
But the radical singularity of its concrete particular temporary
Existence was eternal to the longevity of my corporeality.
I did not experience a representation but the thing itself,
And the thing itself become a new existence in my neurons and blood.
 
All this happened to me while having an al fresco lunch in Italy,
While the ristorante calico cat slept speared across my shoe strings.


TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATION NO. 657
  
We sat in a Roma arcade, and outside the dimming shadows
Of where we were varnished by sunlight we observed Trajan's
Advertisement and how in our day this column with it many
Chariots, helmets, and spears would have been "sound bites."
 
What before carved stone would have been noise.
Yesterday, it was Sorrento, the scent of cliff orange trees
And an orange headed brown bird joyfully hopping in slight misty blue rain.
We sat in another arcade, glazing through Campari at Italy.
 
I looked at the blue appearance on her hand's skin,
The covering of vessels transporting blood,
And felt this grayish blue surrounded by a blonde pink
Was more distance that the far away blue of the sky.
 
This was another June, we were together in June.
But always came September, we were never together in September.


TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATION NO. 658
  
The night inside the walls of my bedroom,
Kept orating, giving the speeches of totalitarian dictators,
This walled-in night grafted catechisms 
Into the flesh of my quasi-liquid brain. 
 
This night threatened, said I would be tested,
Tested to see if I had memorized what I was
Suppose to believe, how I was supposed to live.
This walled-in night put a blindfold over my eyes,
 
Put a movie screen inside the blindfold,
Said I would only see what this night wanted me to see.
I wondered who or what this night was,
It was the voice of the collective people speaking.
 
I heard a horse neighing outside in the other night,
The night outside was a horse.  I rode away on this horse.


TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATION NO. 659
  
My corporeality translates the language of pebbles
Into an inward possession.  I speculated to myself
On where these pebbles garnered their wisdom,
From the invisible salt in the invisible air,
 
Or from the ocean-educated sand beneath their weight,
Of from the broken seaweeds that spread over their curves.
Perhaps from the splinters of broken lobster traps,
Of the ashes from brains of those buried at sea.
 
I far away from pebbles, listens to the language
Of moss on an oak branch, and the moss spoke
The same language, which my corporality translated
Into an inward possession.  My neurons retranslate.
 
I struggled to subdue the lies spoken into me by people,
So I can feel the truth spoken by pebbles and oak branches.


TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATION NO. 660
 
One July or August day a long time ago I heard
From atop a wood pile a wood thrush sing.
The song was colored topaz, then changed to turquoise,
My corporeality was colored inside.
 
I had just pumped a glass of cold water from squeaks,
I had slept all night in a lopsided shack in rural Lakeland,
When I saw a squirrel fly from an oak to an oak.
In a field on lichen-green covered limestone a meadowlark sung.
 
I was no longer in any space named by man,
But was something else in a real space that never could be named.
The wood thrush kept sending out its abundance.
The wood thrush had migrated from the unnamed.
 
It was a state of being when one feels he is living on the divine earth,
Before the earth was worked by man, before mis-interpreted by man's words.


TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATION NO. 661
  
I stand next to this spot where fallen leaves
Have lost their flexibility to stiffness, green
Become brown, and the brown crumbled into nets,
Dark webs, clinging to dark threads, gold specks,
 
Polished bright when sunlight sneaks between
The cluster of young slick-surfaced bright leaves above.
I stand here watching a young gallinule, silverfish feathers
Peck a speck on the white water that surrounds a water lily.
 
I push away what comes into my mind, all the nonsense
About the chemistry of bogs that I was forced to learn in school.
So much verbiage is wasted in our ignorant school system,
Especially when it comes to establishing old conceptions as lawgivers.
 
I owe each place such as the place of these decaying leaves
For granting me joy and hope in world of destructive slave mentalities.