The windshield wipers swish
in the grey milltown morning.
Water tower. Brick with broken eyes.
Water flowing under a building
where pencils were once assembled.
Yesterday you told me about the way
forestry affects your mind:
hunting poison ivy, leaves of three
with greater poisons in hand,
your mind twists and grows
into moving shapes, tesselations
of trinities, hidden in the brush
like a Magic Eye painting.
The movement of growing things,
the taste of green gets under your skin
and the moons of your nails, with the scent
of dying and sprouting and wet;
a glacial progression,
the crests and depressions
of lunar cycles.
Your magic eye tracks hidden patterns
in the shapes of stillness:
aberrations of motion,
moments of wings and slithering
your blinking shutter captures.
You are always dissolving into patterns;
the metallic edge of your perception
lies awake under mistakes on the ceiling,
demanding resolution.
In the forest, there is no ceiling.
Chaos upon chaos,
everything is broken and healing—
knitting fragments of fractals at the root,
slow orgasms of shared dying
feeding pale green seedlings,
melting together into the undergrowth.
I know this feeling,
of being empty, like Magritte’s cut-out men:
fedora shapes against the sky,
a hole filled with the slow thoughts of trees—
thorns growing from my arm-pores
and twisting toward the canopy,
listening to butterflies,
trusting the direction of light.
© Psyche Marks 2021