I. The Garden

An enchantress sighs in the room you thought empty, clearing a place for you. She calls out, this seductive crone, in a language you almost recall. She needs to remind you of something, but you have no way to respond beyond the ghost-like assent of your presence. Beyond the barking of the dogs, below the level of speech is a place that grants access, so you enter. She carries a lifetime of pain and loss. Hers is an unassailable grief that finds release in the few remaining joys left to her—calling birds down from the trees and feeding them from the palm of her hand, bathing throughout the moonlit night in the tropical garden, loving the humid air that pours the essence of jasmine, lemongrass and nightshade across the ravaged contours of her flesh, a white cat the sole witness to the forms she takes in her purposeful flight from pure earth to pure light. Miracles arise into this nightscape, where pride cannot withstand the onslaught of beauty.  Your limbs grow heavy and descend earthward. Your mouth gnaws the earth in murmurs of longing, ensconced in this woman’s garden where she paints herself into her surroundings, where she paints herself into the light and the darkness.

II. The Lake/The Forest

Where are the people? Where is your tribe? Where are those you have turned your back on? Where are those who have died? Where are the humans you have loved to ground your thought? To bring you back to earth? You are floating with planets and animals and various forms of light. You are floating in water, in air, in the quotidian nature of your thought, in the virtues and pieties you claim to flout. You are floating far out in the middle of a lake, under a billion bright stars, as in a sensory deprivation tank, drifting to the far reaches where no one can save you and your cries bounce off the trees like the call of a lonely coyote or cricket. No different than the way you walk through the autumn woods at dusk, a thousand so-called poems dying on the edge of your mumbling lips, those cold lips that have no time for kissing or speaking a soothing word. With blood in your boots, you stumble through the forest into trees as darkness gathers around you, becomes thick on the air, something you can almost taste. You have gone too far in the dwindling light and now are lost. Too proud to ask directions, too ingrained in your habits to stop mouthing words and to reach out and speak, to ask for help. All this mouthing of holy platitudes, all this mumbling of an inaudible prayer. Oh, autumn patriarch, how you have stumbled through the wet leaves and are blind.

III. The Light

An owl sounds in a far-off oak, calling to its mate after a night of silent hunting. Down in the ravine, a rustling of foxes, and not long after a panic of hares. The neighbors are safe in their accustomed beds. Why are we here? Why do we walk so far abroad? What other spirits of the night to share this damp and heady atmosphere? These formulations toss and turn like a shadow, fever dreams of far-flung constellations and pearls in opalescent galaxies, fever dreams, pertaining to fire, to heat. All is tense coiled nerve. A moth flutters in the streetlight, casting enormous shadows into the surrounding trees. Yet all is contained—no restless wind to carry our thoughts beyond these present dislocations. The light is disjointed and out of array, resting heavy on these sleepless lids, struggling to find purchase, among the jagged crags, on the face of the moon, the sidewalk, the canyon in its glory, the flash of the shutter. A little more light falls in, a little less falls out. Here is something lying face down. Here is something wan and ghostly.

– Tim Hawkins