@d-pend Was there a locale less arid than this:
Where rivulets refreshing ever run?
Perhaps that was a fantasy of bliss
Conceived under the furious-hot sun
That blazes me invisibly with rays.
And neither do the columns go unscathed
Upholding black-and-orange locality;
But parch and crack, and in warm dust are bathed
By exhalations—perpetuity
Of phantoms on horizon fiery.
What is this auburn corse in finery
That occupies position where my frame
Was lively once with flush of waking flesh?
All scratched and skeletal, and sunk by blame
Into this crevice where the magmic thresh
Of ectoplasmic tongues of fire rage.
It must be I was born in cursèd age —
Or charmed with high-flown terror and delight
Into my nook where gentle scrabblings
For lullabies exchange and ebb the fright
Of orange daytime, where with fervid wings
The bats and gargoyles their frolics have.
I must be as a long-forgotten staff
Of some journeying wizard set aside:
Sentient enough to think and feel
While latent, in paralysis I bide;
Yet witless quite — numbly do I kneel
Unthinking, waiting for the master's turn
Of gait that brings him back around to me.
In ordinary opposites the spurn
Of light on dark makes manifest the sea
And sets the depths apart from shallow waves.
Yet in this realm the flame and aether meld;
From merging only feeble stranding saves.
By livid wire is my coil held —
To witness cataclysm and record
The comings and the goings of the rain.
Deluge of laser-snow and scald of sand,
The etchings of a careless potency
Entrapping all the mages of the land
To reason out illogicality
Of burning nothing, boiling titian lakes
Of this strange black-and-orange locality.
Whatever scene appears as merely dream
Appears so only once the dreamer wakes.
So long as one's submergèd does it seem
Full tangible — the boiling titian lakes
Encompass one, and stifle, and compress.
Original writing and photos by Daniel Pendergraft,
created to be published to HIVE on May 7th, 2020.
