Cerulean Dome

A vacuum flask in the bruise-purple air, Etching the dark with geometries of despair. A pet, coiled cool on the sun-bleached sill, And the hollow syntax of a talk grown still. Through a lens of petroleum, slick and wide, Your grin hangs static; my gaze slides aside. Gears slip their cogs in a backward sigh, As tomorrow’s promise is déjà vu’s lie. Should the cerulean dome be rent and peeled, Would the plunge of a body be faintly revealed? I’ll pocket the vowels of unvisited towns And tread the tightrope of these crumbling downs. A dairy mirage in a thirst-land’s heat, A saline logic, deceit made sweet. With each albino lament from the wire, Our tall tales harden, become funeral pyre. The chart is gone, a phantom in the brain, Each print I find becomes a minor-key strain. Medusae pulse in the high, starless tide, A waltz that scatters the cosmos aside. Were the satellite’s face to flush and swell, Could you decipher the siren’s knell? I’ll ink the first bar of a ghostly score, Then close the folio, forevermore. If heaven’s vitrine should splinter and cascade, A billion bright motes in a glissade, We two might harvest that luminous sand, And trace new figments with a shared, blind hand. Cobalt expanse and a garnet sphere, Bleed into one brief, beautiful smear. Ignorance, here, is a kind of grace— A fleeting faith in this time and place. When a zephyr, sheer as a surgeon’s blade, Parts the veil of the charade, What’s ahead, what’s behind—all null, all void— We jump from the platform, unalloyed.