Atrium Car Ceri

descending the hill

through the vascular night

glide twin halogens,

systolic dark

edging their light

spasms then closes

reflexively behind them

as though a wound.

We fear the slip of signatory
animals: turned, as any word

into a state of something more
divested: oceans are apt,

pouring forth as attributes
exceed the name,

to blind, and masters to follow
butchers, open-mouthed,

as if half through singing.
The name is strictly similar

for animals; of mouths, what clears
throats for swallowing.

Colophon

I would fill the journals
you've left to me as gifts,

perhaps the slim one
bookmarked by a knife

which cleaves to or through
the signatures depending

on the weight of bound material
and hilt as balanced over a door

I leave ajar. But.
As the knife

turns the door in,
sometimes the air resists,

the book falls
face open to the floor,

the doorknob severed.
A trap for game; though I am

a solitary animal I can hear
the warning of the words

I will not write:
All hinges on me. Some alarm.

Aggressions make way
for material,

as often a knife is used
to turn a door.

Self bound and blind,
the catalogue echoes

the master, who dives
for worlds, forwards

following the guide
of the thing he drowned.

Other Prosperos have drowned
a book to make it sing.

So I stay awake all night
watching the third worldly tide

(darkness) recede
and catalog everything

with my peripheral vision
and its superior eye

for divestiture. Or
as an oceanographer

diving in a bell, delivered
from sensory deprivation

by the ringing in my ears,
nitrogen bubbles, paroxysm smile.