Although there are ways of looking at a snake
without fragmenting,
oft our own eyes undo us. If.
Hallucinations slithered
& hung like mobiles in the air. Came
in the form of dreams akimbo
as fractured wrists. A garden
left to its own device
(which reverts back into the rich
slime of dark vegetal hours).
I was enslaved as the light of
a colossal imagination
but whose? I
wracked my coldmind
for a clear word for fear
of what is seen, unseen.
All that.
You could touch me
& not reach me. Something else moved
in the grass. Unfinished, & stoned
out of my brain on medicine, an acrolith
both hatch- & receding in deep
relief, instead of the tomatoes
I watered my feet.
Sunk like ruins or an obelisk ever-
so, infinitesimal, into earth.
Who was I
anymore?
Valerie Roybal, Transmutation 3 (collage)