The cat sits under pink flowers.
The cat sits in sunlight.
The sunlight blurs like golden dust
blowing between her and me.
Her white-gold fur melts into wind,
into light and dust.
It blurs. It becomes pink flowers.
I no longer know where each one ends.
I no longer know where I begin.
Am I beside the cat?
Or is the cat
(alive or dead,
or merely imagined) –
is she inside me?
Magma flows beneath a bed of ferns:
fire fretted through lace,
dendritic leaves of elemental silver.
Birds here spark and rise, singing glass-shatter.
I fear the birds are mostly a delusion.
Ice and embers share a voice,
as does the chink of cooling lava.
And, honestly, the magma
is just part of the diorama.
Stepping back, you see the silver ferns flank an automaton
beneath the window of the north side-chapel.
Ticking and unwinding, she plays Bach on a celeste.
Her face, tipped slightly, glows harlequin, for
she has summoned the spirit of the window.
Blue is cobalt, red is gold,
that peculiar yellow is uranium oxide.
Molten light shards captive, bound in lead.
But beneath the net,
a broad, bright, flow-ruffled sea:
the parable of Christ,
unshod,
walking on the magma.
