Beneath the canopy’s green hush,a secret country labours in the dark.What seems still is only waiting;what seems dead is already opening,thread by thread beneath the bark. Fungus arrives without alarm,a patient grammar written in white filaments,finding its way through splinter, seam, and wound,speaking softly to the wooduntil the wood begins to answer. Here, the forest … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Mycelial Dominion” – Colonizing Decay, v.2
Revisionist Poetry – “Sepulchre of Winter Light” – Hints of Sunset, v.4
The sun dies beautifully. It sinks behind the black-veined treeslike a lantern lowered into deep water,casting bruised sepia upon the snowless earth—a final sacrament before the long extinguishing. Above us,clouds mass like ruined kingdoms. The cold arrives with intelligence.It creeps beneath doors,whispers along the eaves,lays thin silver fingers upon the glass. Soon the storm descends. … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Sepulchre of Winter Light” – Hints of Sunset, v.4
Revisionist Poetry – “Before the Snow Claims Evening” – Hints of Sunset, v.3
The sunset does not vanish all at once. It retreats slowly,like warmth leaving old hands. Gold thins to rust.Rust deepens to wine-dark shadow.Clouds drift over the skylike heavy cathedral cloth. The coming storm announces itself in fragments:the ache in the wind,the nervous sway of branches,the sudden absence of birds. Snow is already imaginedbefore it falls. … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Before the Snow Claims Evening” – Hints of Sunset, v.3
Revisionist Poetry – “Ember Hour” – Hints of Sunset, v.2
The sun hangs low—a coal bruised redagainst the throat of evening,bleeding sepia through the bones of trees. One final flarebefore the west closes over it. Cold gathers early.Along the roads,the wind rehearses its sharp grammar,lifting loose snowlike pale ash from a dying fire. Somewhere beyond the hills,the storm is assembling itself—vast,deliberate,buttoning the sky with iron … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Ember Hour” – Hints of Sunset, v.2
Revisionist Poetry – “The Attic of October” – Inherited Halloweens, v.4
Inheriting the Halloween relics,we ascend into the dustened loftwhere old boxes breathe their mildew hymnsand every lid seems sealed with midnight. Within them lie the legacies of October:faded masks with mouths fixed in dread,papier-mâché phantoms gone yellow with age,skeletal faces grinning through their decayas if death itself had learned to decorate. They wait there like … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “The Attic of October” – Inherited Halloweens, v.4
T.A.E.’s Book Review – A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses is one of the most enduringly graceful accomplishments in children’s poetry, but its reputation as a nursery classic can obscure how artfully strange, psychologically nuanced, and formally sophisticated it is. Published in 1885, the collection presents itself as a sequence of simple poems drawn from the imaginative … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson
Revisionist Poetry – “The House Remembers Halloween” – Inherited Halloweens, v.3
Every year the attic gives backits inheritance of masks and skeletons,its cracked lanterns, its grinning dead,packed away like captured weather. You can still feel them breathingunder the dust and folded paper:those papier-mâché phantoms,those goblins with their painted shock,those jack-o’-lantern facesfrozen in the act of becoming night. They once stood at the edge of the streetunder … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “The House Remembers Halloween” – Inherited Halloweens, v.3
Revisionist Poetry – “Inheritances of October” – Inherited Halloweens, v.2
Inheriting the Halloween trunks,we lift out years wrapped in cardboard— paper ghosts, bent witches,plastic skulls with their fixed bright grins. Each object keeps its small empireof porch-light, wind, and ringing doorbells;each one remembersthe shriek of a child half-laughing,half-convinced the dark has teeth. These relics do not sleep entirely.They wait in their tissue paper coffins,their hollow … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Inheritances of October” – Inherited Halloweens, v.2
Revisionist Poetry – “Tenant of the Dark” – Growing, v.4
In dreams, I am overrun. Not by force at first,but by manners. It arrives with its pale hatsand whispering hems,tipping itself politelythrough the corridors of my skull. “Only a little room,” it seems to say.“Only a little damp.Only a corner of your thinking.” And because it speaks so softly,I let it in. It gathers in … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Tenant of the Dark” – Growing, v.4
Revisionist Poetry – “Mycelium in the Mind” – Growing, v.3
In sleep I am a house gone damp. Something whitens in the darkbehind my eyes. At first it is only a haze,a moth-fine blurring of thought—then the spores take root. They move with terrible courtesy,spreading through the corridors of me,down into the hinges of my jointswhere pain begins to flower. I can feel them learning … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Mycelium in the Mind” – Growing, v.3