Ric Carfagna



from Symphony No. 9
    (nocturnes & thresholds)


47

So speak
of the depths
of the sea
of frozen ash
and the caustic taste
of acid rain
falling on disintegrating
uranium plains
so speak of a crow
on a funerary barge
a sky
above an ocean
and the eye
to follow
black clouds
piling on the horizon’s line

. . .

and what of
the dim-lit visions
materializing
a bridge spanning
an azure distance
an abstraction
to the mind
that seeks
to isolate
the prescience within
a crow’s probing lament
and a chamber music
casting dissonant shadows
of annihilating light
through a mirror’s
splintering anonymity

. . .

and this    is not unlike
the raging of a madman
or the void inside
his sinewy eye
or his smoked-glass mind’s
trough of delirium
distilling
a desert of silence
in the archetypal blinded
star fields of night

. . .

and this     is not unlike
the psychotic
ash fields of fate
forming from a hole
in a theoretical equation
where an ocean exists
as a light through a doorway
where eroded oracles
speak of death
as a mind-numbing fiction
buried in a transient humanity’s
collective dream



69

At 4:06pm
framing
a hole in a wall
a point
wherein light
diminishes
in the shadow
of falling celestial tides
discordant pulsations
echoing through
a terrestrial morass
a swinging pendulum
at a window
a waxing moon
eclipsing
the winterbourne castrations
of an irradiated night
a consciousness lost
in the sleep
of empirical infolding
in the sonorous edges
of tubular bell resonance
in silken waves left
in the adagio’s wake

. . .

and to stand within
this attenuating fog
where what is unknown
interprets the fray
where glass factories
are thoughts
shattering in abstract
diagonal shafts of light
and the turbulent eye
bifurcates
the distance reached
as a corridor dissolves
in a gray silken cloud
in a rigid tone of steel
in a circularly streaming
periphery of tone
in a dissonant searing
through the dead hedgerow
and in the bleeding wounds
of glandular membranes
within transient vessels
clothed in flesh



Ric Carfagna was born and educated in Boston Massachusetts.
He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently:
Symphonies Nos.1, 4 & 6 published by Chalk Editions
Symphonies Nos. 2 & 7 published by Argotist Press and
Symphony No.5 published by White Sky Books.
Symphonies Nos. 3, 8 & 9 are slated for publication later this year.
 
 
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