Saturday, February 4, 2012


“Chipa” © Mike Absalom January 3rd 2012

The scent of wet wood hand
sawn on a January morning
returns to me again the
sunless sweetness of solitude.
I have cut this cottonwood
many times before
but always,
in a sleight of hand
impossible to follow,
leaves gush like leaking sap
from its dead branches.
I have even seen flowers
burst with the speed of comets
from out of the blotchy bark.
They scatter as turf ash does
into the wind-blown skies,
and sometimes I scatter with
them,
for they are able to whirl me
in a dervish dance
deep into my own silence.

A blue dragon fly,
another lotus beast
risen from the mud of the
pond
to put a diadem into the sunless
day,
floated towards me this
morning
riding on a stream,
like the Virgin of Ca’acupé,
sparkling with a halo of tiny
starlets,
each carrying a plate of
freshly baked chipa.
Bread of Heaven, it seems,
although today I would have
preferred wine.
Another person
might have seen them as
midges.
But then
another person
might not know how to get
drunk
on bread.

These flashbacks come more
often now.
I suppose it is Age,
that batty old projectionist,
starting to rewind the
celluloid.
Or a perhaps a closer
proximity
to the Black Hole of Death
has started to stretch those
parts of me
that alcohol was never able
to reach.

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