“Springtime” © Bonnie Matthews Brock

 

Moonlight and the Insignificant Spider

Everything unspeakably small or great in your life
must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence
– even this spider and this moonlight between the trees
                                                                          Zarathustra

When a great bird pecks at clownish yellow
and makes a hollow in the plasma who can hear
screams no matter how hot the vacuum
no matter how streams of light escape
vibrating up a deep warp in space
spiraling round a temporal abyss
defying new dimensions toward a bow shock
that protects delicate moments and fleeting thoughts

In such waves of an empty medium
Zarathustra warns the sun
of sinking into the underworld
just as has been an evening habit
of that German writing Persian seer
who also descends in dusk’s soft light
into an abyss that once resisted
but opens now to swallow him again

Those below seek high paying jobs
with few responsibilities but with
creative opportunities such as merging
protons into alpha particles
giving light and warmth to dwellings
huddled on banks of quenching streams
pulled over stones and down rapids
to evaporate condense fall and flow

For reasons unknown but time will tell
in unmistakable echolocation script
words plagued in fire whose fire flames
singing so long and thanks for all the fish
if that continues and who can doubt it will
disregarding a personal god quaquaquaqua
outside of time without extension

“My great surfeit of human beings –
that choked me and crawled into my throat”
something Nietzsche said Zarathustra said
in or around a cave in or around some mountains
where air is sweet and music is a slow
“How lovely it is that there are words and sounds
… rainbows and illusory bridges between
things eternally separated”

And when circles of abstraction burst open
and when worlds beyond the bowl of stars
fixed over Alexandria and that great library
separate their own radiation from a fixed firmament
and when island universes beyond a galaxy
of here and of now peer out of a deep past
and into a lean present only there will be where
real is revealed as merely fields clashing in an abyss.

 

John Marvin is an 84 year old cardiac and cancer patient who still feels young. He has published over 200 poems and received 6 Pushcart nominations. He likes to slosh in the marshland between art and science with his dog, Hugo.

Bonnie Matthews Brock is a Florida-based photographer, as well a school psychologist. She loves hiking the urban and woodland trails of “anywhere” (and pausing often to shoot photos) with her very patient husband (and often collaborator), Ted. Her images have been featured on the covers of magazines such as Ibbetson Street, Wild Roof Journal, Poesy Magazine, Humana Obscura, and Arkansas Review; as well as on the pages of publications such as Oddball Magazine, Ember Chasm Review, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Beaver Magazine, and Lateral. Her works are archived at institutions such as Poets House NYC, Brown University, and Harvard University.