11/12/15

Colonia
By AE Reiff


You must not grudge to find the same soul in leviathan or in behemoth, since they divide the world into land beast and the water beast whose gigantic size are as if a world to themselves. There is a whole herd of Texas behemoth in the uplands and I don't mean the Nazi auroch transplants that escaped big game ranches. These are often spotted and browned, but have so trampled the earth into mine tailings, shards and shreds of rock and dirt that one wonders what they eat at all, but they go up into the thousand mountains to forage trees. There are no natural enemies there unless you count peremptory lightning strikes. It is said they do not breed, that there is only one and that it waits to meet its mate in leviathan. Such a joining of male and female, land and sea, is rather more than any Greek fantasy. But this singularity does not account for the massed hulks that look more like landslides than reconstituted mastodon. Living higher up as they do the lightening strikes are more frequent than foreseen, keeping the population manageable, if one can speak of managing behemoth. But the polyploided escapes from labs also included rats as big as cars, coyotes as big as parking garages, or at least that was the myth current in the cities below.

Mabinog colonists down by the water, hang with their backs to the land and gaze out to sea, the poems of Kiss embossed in holograms behind them at Dulce Port. They sit on jetties, reverie on Ocean Inhaesio, extasis, seeking the thing, not the thing's reason. Too new upon the land to even carry succubi in their hands, eyes open on keypads while their ears hear the roar, they wait in the smell of salt for leviathan. Think that sculptors and the piscine shapes of women know what goes? How many fishes in the deep blue sea? What’s the cause of simplicity in priests?

Tidal influence at Old Town reaches pretty far inland. In the water light of several moons hunted by wolf and cub, single rectilinear, curvilinear, pi, it is the mind that sees not the eye. Old Dame Trot some cold fish had got, and as the mind is bent, delusions come to temples, labs, board rooms, sanctums as Ezekiel sees in the visions of Elohim, where elders swing their censers before idols, hitty, pitty within the wall, and images of death dress up as life, inverted. Light as wave in water refracts to disperse chromatic aberration. Galloping Galloway, look at your neck; there you will find the strap. The standoff between draggle distortion and dreary convention collaborates physical forms; pickled pig is made of pork.

I point to the arch center of the Quandarists, the rearranged curves and planes of lines, Picadors on the verge. People against nature, Rhetors against Neptune, beds of Querist hothouses, nature is innocent compared. Flames and reactions make beautiful acceptance of infierni. Down at the dock they get in and drift from shore. After a while the evening news, the weather is unfamiliar. The way things go, none believable, the land itself is fabricate. The boat moves further to the outreach of history in the aquarium humane. Submerged ruins intersperse with dreams, voyages make strange and vivid optics of waking slumber, unconscious from the ground. I'd never seen a ship that sailed that wide.

Such changes observed here I believe are capable of explanation either by errors of observation or seasonal change. The Colony not only produces several vegetations per year with different appearances, but its aspects vary over years. Seasonal variation affects a sapling that catches fire, hisses, drips and spits before it is the dry trunk, or as a thorn bush that goes up in whoosh, visibility combined with invisibility among the colonias. A twig coming from this plant could simulate this shift. Archuleta is a case in point, which did not possess land only to itself. At least five caves honeycombed that region, but plenty of others were visible from the peaks, a magnificenza waiting to be discovered with stupor and deception. I caught sight of several who kept their heads and even their chests above the tide of transverberation which the eye and the wave equivocate together. Simple rectilinear, curvilinear pi, Fibonacci ratios, golden sections, fractal repetitions the mind sees, not the eye. In the mind bends, delusions came to the temples, labs, board rooms, sanctums of foreheads such as Ezekiel saw in that vision of Elohim, elders swinging their censers before idols, images of death as life, inverted. The standoff of distortion and convention collaborating is as good an idea of self similarity as a human skew. Old Town was a marine museum of the mind where Dedalus heated onions in a pan. If these firings were apocalypses, Greece emptied of all its whales, a cave of white onions, then the pine will die in the fire! A thousand springs flow into this lake against thought and forethought. When stone hits glass the breakage conforms to gravity and glass. Then reason covers her breasts. Only the tension in the circle of artist, glass and stone and the freedom to act and crack unknowing reveals the submerged. Yes that is a little simple. Crack the stone, conceal the stone, railroad ties connote forced labor, famine stone denotes starvation and slavery. Of course I wept, tears ran from my eyes as if I were burning wood to make charcoal.

Believe that and read the Great Wall as a kiln opening that asks, what is the seventh seal? I hate to spoil the ending. Round as an apple, deep as a cup. The most peculiar case is the Ulysses, the other face of Judecca, of strange riddles in steady air, that put to rest natural causation. The regularity of the caves, uniform width, their systematic radiation exceeds any ordinary natural contrivance. What they are not helps to decipher what they are.


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AE Reiff is a poet whose poems appear as fiction. His fiction appears as poems. There is this masquerade of nonpoetic themes of politics, history, espionage, although the war that backgrounds these has a long poetic expression defined from the beginning of time. These are indexed during business hours at Encouragements For Planting.