Joseph Harms
What portion in the world can the artist have who has awakened from the common dream but dissipation and despair? All thought becomes an image and the soul becomes a body too lonely for the traffic of the world.1 Wander where there is no way.2 Impregnable as light, as undiscovered gold, walk within the veil.3 The soul remembering its loneliness shudders in many cradles.4 Your soul may well faint in you.5 The eye sees not itself but by reflection, by some other things.6 Do business in great waters. See its works in the wonders of the deep.7 This disturbed sky is not to walk in. The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks trusty as the stars whose antiquated blossom makes a world’s suspense perish and rejoice.8 The terror is memory or foreknowledge of the hour when all is fed with light and heaven is bare. There is no deformity but saves us from a dream.9 Jessed to life in jest just in case you ingest the Nihil of Life itself, the votive in all things, the sun as well an oppilate to this aphotic flame, a pill I ate first in dream then in pain then always as an inoculum for lowercase life wherein at best you may at times see out through an oculus or oubliette when not obnubilate with oppilates, this votive aphotic apotropaic hamartial telos a genesis, a well once seen beyond eloigning beyond the cering sky. Spring hail like lightning drills into the earth aeolian serein from faroff virga on this otherwise vitrined day aeonian wherein zeppelins like reified deified hope against horizonal overstories spark like mussitate mufflers dragged through dreams paltry and profound, far better than life. Death means so little that what happens is not real. The sky is like a vision, an open bleeding space. There is an unreal world down beneath something full of undefined life. This is no longer life. It must be called by some other name even greater and more sacred. Become like someone else or something else, something besides yourself…There’s no parting, no boundary. Nothing has happened.10 Dandelions puncture the sward. From the slightest fielded depression alluvial diluvian frogs stridulate Sibelius as rote in this hinterland. Streetlamps and luciferin votives praise without hope this bluing hour the very shade of the empyreal meridian between grumous gules and stardarkle. Knifehit planes baste the basting sky. Satellites sail almost like wonder. Not quite. Soon a helterskelter moon will willynilly pellmell the sideral cupola into erasure itself.
1 W. B. Yeats
2 Psalms
3 Emily Dickinson
4 W. B. Yeats
5 Psalms
6 William Shakespeare
7 Psalms
8 William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson
9 W. B. Yeats
10 Pär Lagerkvist
Joseph Harms is the author of the poetry collections Bel, Nous, Goety, Youel, and Funest, which have been collected in Taps (Todos Contentos & Yo También Press); as well as the novels Ades, Baal, Cant, and Wyrd, which have been collected in Evil (Expat Press). He is currently at work on Nihil, a centonical epic about nothingness and its echo—life.