That this passage down
through cobbled plains, past molten palace walls
of batholithic stone, and jagged chutes,
may conjure memories of monuments and surreal scenes
is not mere strange
but unaccountable; nor does it bear
resemblance to romantic picture-poems
or those grisly gothic tales
these regions have aroused. Time, laggard, lamed,
is left behind; a kind of vertigo
ensues; and recently unencumbered souls
may turn upon themselves,
like tops, like dervish dancers whirling
through the night;
at best, but incompletely informed,
a seamed connect, a tenuous touch,
as if the world they have left behind,
and will never see again or feel,
was a somehow-merely-scan of fevered flight,
fiction written, razed, rewritten, then transposed
into a twisted, barbarous tongue of sound,
a fantasy of floating landscape and a land
before existence as we know it
was even considered: a prior unevolved state,
preceding and preempting the laws
by which our universe functions
had been facilitated.
‘And if,’ as he thinks, ‘this muddied
mix of mental aberration’s a mirage’,
is it because he is really remembering
some will-of-the-wisp: some wife or friend,
an episode unfolded, now enclosed,
as multi-membraned as a fetus in its chamber;
or is he but one last brief laugh, the Metaphor,
the ad hoc madness of some seriously alienated being?
He swims in this, the long losing
and the regaining of his will: of who
he is, and the why he came;
and of its inevitable futility.