Trace. Eric Pankey

drop of sweat down her breast veers and misses her nipple

      Chaos, it’s said, was born first

      Riverside willow leaf turns, turns, caught in an eddy

      Instant yet everlasting

      Iron oxide, smeared ochres, charcoal gestures: flanks, tusks, hooves

      Cuckoo song among the oaks

      Orion at the horizon; linens freeze on a line

      By noon shade evaporates

      At the fray, at the fray of memory

       Primitive Water

      Cherry blossoms on the ink-stone —

      Gutters, leaf-choked, overflow —

      The path along the ridgeback washed out —

      Seedlings, saplings, a poplar girded with wrist-thick vines —

      If not for the gnarled, knuckley habit of words I might at last have a purchase on silence —

      The deer freeze, skitter, then fly —

      Snare of antlers —

      The burden and effort of constructing meaning —

      The quick bickering of jays —

      The river seen from above as the character for dragon —

      Five crows roost and shake down blossoms —

      Myth, not history, predates one’s childhood —

      There one can disinter the gibbous moon, the essential Arcanum, the primitive water’s source —

       Models of Paradise

      The mountain, all haze and mist,

      Is without fixed form,

      yet by mid-morning

      It stands clear: an ax-trimmed jade fragment.

      After the afterimage slips away,

      One utters against

      the utter silence

      And time congeals again, as always, as matter.

      The water tastes of lead, or rather the aftertaste of lead:

      Honey of exile,

      salt of lacrimae antiquae — One part per billion yet distinct.

      Distracted, I looked around as others prayed.

      Sinew fitted to bone.

      Muscle to sinew.

      The body’s dust is dust.

      Ice, a cold weld, holds for now.