Apprehension of Eccentric Center

Shad Halsey

“It is an illusion that we were ever alive”
- Wallace Stevens, The Rock

I

While at the lip imagine I
an epiphany
ill or well know I, not at all.

Aware of I
grown close to know
empty surrounded by
woven dark-light: all earned
and accident fates. I want
experience and to expire

again again but only
atoms have answers, no desire
while I repeats – an infant cry.

II

Old Wallace knows
you need a snow brain to know the snow,
that self-awareness sets you alone.

But over tea, he is – lonely and loving it –
rememb’ring Coleridge and Keats
interpreting the sea.

Words put in place of mountains,
rocks plucked from space to weight indited thought
ink songs still audible
for now,
and for now.

III

Weight distributed
unable to pierce the tense
surface thus to sink
into the heat-rippled stone,
methodically pumping in spin
tumbling the sea, and radiant wind.

Me, skittering bug blown adrift
fathoms translation abyss, the orbits innumerate
while blind to the in-between
so much unknowable space
before molting like magnesium
spark and lost amid the waves.