text || Ric Carfagna

       

         
              from Symphony No.3
              (caryatids for the firmament)


                         Ric Carfagna



XV

And here a world within the black dog’s soul
stones in the orchard shadowed by night
the iron cords which sink deep into the malleable veins
yet to see these small pinions of light arise
a prism’s grind through a crow’s tessellated wing
fragile rags infesting the sky’s isolating sphere
here each pallid alabaster tongue 
sings of the nocturnal angel’s distillate embrace
sings to the larval ocean god’s sutured torso        
sings to the treading bloodless detrital skeletons 
    leaching through the gauzy opaque ivory keyhole
sings to the cerulean-eyed leaden sun
    falling upon the bare acid grassland waste
sings to the evolving aphasic nitrate fetus
    clinging to the pitted ulcerated arterial walls
sings to the gaunt parasitical quanta
    breaching the plutonium atom’s impermeable sea
sings to the dying galaxy’s phosphorescent moraine
    flowing through the quarried granite statuary limbs –

XLIV

Shadows from the orchid garden
laced as silk spun to the tapestry
she held this image
    apart from her ideation of eternity
she lay within its sulfured darkness
    within its calming marbled belly
she thought of the inexhaustible atoms
still coursing through the dead beggar’s corpse
how decay will change to immaterial essence
holding its nature 
    immune from the speculative philosopher’s ken
she thought of the day’s attenuating intaglio of light
of the embalming isolative tongue of evening’s decent
of the rooted fractal layers of oceanic dust
of the bleeding menstrual torch
    seething its acrid bane of fate
of the unrequited dreamless sleep
    imprisoned behind eyes of martyred desire –

- Intermezzo IX - 

On the walls
the seven stars
of Plato’s brain

in the valley
dwarfs
hungry for strange comfort

in the city
the sound of molded bells
the sound of trampled thoughts 
the sound of those left behind 
         in haste

a spectral dog    dead in the road
      a silver cloud’s   descending 
                  hinge of blindness


LIX

It is late in the autumnal geometer’s ironwork elegy
he has slept here within the willow’s shade
he has slept as one who dreams
dreaming in a numinous cloister’s abluted glade
he has dreamt of eyes
eyes that once existed
eyes of the gaunt vassal’s nomadic revenant
    arising from the scarlet hued pavement veins
eyes blinded by refulgent primordial shards
    from a shattered galaxy’s cosmic anamnesis
eyes observing the blackened hyponogogic raven
    devouring the orchid arisen at dawn
eyes of the bleeding sea-wrack refugee
    impaled on the blooded tyrant’s astigmatic spire
eyes gilded by mute days of sundered ruin 
    trembling as smoke drifting 
        across an unquenchable gulf
eyes of the burning tundra kings
    entombed in rusted anthracite obelisks
eyes of the agrarian peasant’s unborn progeny
    cowering beneath the yoke of embryonic oppression
eyes of the bended mind’s corrosive isolation
    shuttered in the quantum caves of oceanic atrophy
eyes of the beguiling parasitical serpent
    infecting the coiled fetus helix –




LXXIII

It is said 
the witch enters into the heart of the jackal
when the clouds pass
indistinguishably
below the raven-hunted gallows pole
when the silent leaf falls 
unnoticed
in a forest of abraded late afternoon light
when all time is realized
as occurring 
simultaneously within 
the sentient mitochondrial helix
yet it is darkness
that clothes
the scarlet threaded  limbs
darkness which remains
an impregnable diseased light
darkness
which leaves its traces 
at the sparrow’s grave
darkness
which leaves its traces 
in the radiant valence of entangled atoms
darkness
which leaves its traces 
in the spiraling galaxy’s evolving decay
darkness
which leaves its traces 
in the incommensurable pathos
bleeding from the heart lost to wilderness
darkness
which leaves its traces 
in the tyrant’s scouring iron eye
    hungered with fleshly pestilence
darkness
which leaves its traces 
in the oblique sea of rotting cilia
    swimming in the celestial womb’s placental blood
darkness
which leaves its traces 
in the scourging abyss 
    of the madman’s mind
darkness
which leaves its traces 
as dawn’s muted luminous spires
    shattering the glassy veiled firmamental chalice –




- Aria VI - 

These  walls
stained with madness
and stagnant longing

 a soul’s withdrawn universe
             a shadowed sentinel
 floats alone

a creature mislead 
by the obscure
discourse of mad oracles


Ric Carfagna
November, 2010