Camille Martin

Cusp

sizzle of the last protozoan



Out-of-earshot scripts

cross thresholds of belief.



The chitinous exoskeleton of a locust

perches on a dam. As the floodgates

burst, thought swears it hears

a high-pitched trill but has no memory

of its lacustrine past.



La vie dorée rushing

by. Rushing through

a vacuum riddled

with the mundane.

The mundanity of the moist

quiddity the desert

makes off with.

***

Doppelgänger’s Lament

Continuous coverage of already-solved swindles

is how your story goes down. At intervals, hype

jingles with the faux naiveté of felons at large.

Secretly you yearn to be in the midst of a true-life

crime story with its McGuffins, its quest

for hollow penguins hidden in plain sight

to lead the gumshoe astray. You ditch the fantasy

and live a pretty normal life, occasionally saving the day

with cartoonish light bulbs switching on with impeccable

timing, viewing creation from a precisely-gauged periphery,

clock ticking and stopping and ticking. No plugging

the drain, scraping ancestral facades. And if you could,

maybe you’d rather peer at a blank wall, inwardly filming

all the could-have-beens teeming before your eyes.

A life of unbroken crime.

***

No Such Identical Horses

I was counting on my favourite superstition

to endow the mirage with authority. I was bobbing

for dissolved apples, placing my faith

in the rendezvous of generic rogues and dupes.

Glossy scenarios pretend not to pretend.

Not like the World Series. Nor rocking chairs or

Lazyboys or clippers dragging their barnacled anchors,

but an average sentence, in Latin for instance,

or magic incantations. Like when you say

what you’re going to say, then say it, then

say what you just said. Thought fleeces island

from chart. Marrow goads other things of marrow.

Storm swell stirs poppies at the bottom

of a teacup. Maybe I wouldn’t know

if I ate wormy fruit or hoarded chipped china.

I think I recognize the horse inside my head,

but throw a pinch of salt anyway.

***

The Tyranny of X

The question of what

what was

seemed urgent at

the time. Then something

begetting (itself

unidentifiable) begets

a litter of nameless

flakes, not unlike

satellites doling out

snapshots of myriad

selves. Selves, dust

settling onto

a mirror’s tinfoil.

Dust kindling

risk, risk

altering brush.

All any wisp needs:

chorus unfolding

silk accordion fan.

Ever more

wisps annihilate wispy

being after the shudder

of thought thought

final: ants herald

storms, seeds

cleave sod. After

the crash of solidity,

new heretics take

to pocketing

lint, pawn,

dipping bird,

any x up

to nothing.

***

Porous Creed

An emerging word requires faith

in what greets every living day:

cat’s eye shrouded in altostratus,

horizon gossiping about flames

of translucent ballerina. A word jostles

with other motes within a keyhole:

existence without audience,

like a Gurnsey jumping two metres

when no one’s looking. A word revises

every rose and its reverse,

confounds every dam and its brink. It bids

farewell to props in vaudeville trunks.

Spontaneously on the lam, it stops

on a dime; at the threshold of speech,

translates chatterings of gnats.

It dons heft without crumpling

into a dull heap. And it trembles that each

violet twilight might be the last.

That it would miss. That

and looking at the cat’s eye

and the cat’s eye looking back.

***

***