The soul’s delved spectacle. That network. Its
secret society. Roots beeted with blood it radiates around,
in a platinum of darkness. A redness suspected but
esoteric to you. Coral-hard tendrils, fragile-looking
but living, so flexible — a slow-motion yoga of inversion. Porphyry taproots
the system alludes to quaff minerals out of the earth
the soul sucks likewise for itself, competitively.


Otherwise nothing is red.


Some metaphors for the inner world:
a landscape
sheets of rain wave over;
a forest
a forest of darkness
a tree
whose arborescence is a space ship’s
— rocket-exhaust root-cloud —
a grassy field
with interdependent root-structure
roots
“roots & leaves themselves alone”
caves
caverns
cathedrals
with impressive vaults, decaying tombs a whole 20th century’s worth of light pours over achronical, embalmed
an illuminated manuscript stylometrically illegible
except to initiated readers
a semi-private room decorated in frescoes
of a mildly mythological import
an animal
a dove
any wingèd thing
a unicorn
a lover
a thirsty hart drinking from a source
for me, some of Thoreau, some of Emerson
Whitman & Dickinson
Ronald Johnson’s ARK
a light
but a light sphered in adamantine blackness
viruses expand vibrantly over.


When Eurydice turned from Orpheus she was
already root, already crimson-redolent with the earthiness of sleep. The point here
is that she was real, however
unbearably
imagined.