Two Pieces
Daniel Fitzpatrick
Middle Passage as an Impasse
There are stars like flowers on the flood.
Watch the jaws come glittering into view
to fish them, splay them ragged
on the blind back of our horror.
Have you packed the stars in smoldering rows
to unconceive the longing they excite?
Lock the roses in your cabin.
Feed that element where seeing founders.
Have they blinded you?
And did you dream that stars could steel your eyes?
Expect the nightmare oozing puckered
and spined from the dregs of your consignments.
Lift your head and graze that last
mosaic cloud quilted to conceal yourself
from you as the ship’s wheel lashed
to your swollen wrists lurches
and creaks toward this tale
we tear aside so we can sleep.
Kandinsky at the Closing of an Eye
You do not have to stay awake
to make a habit of amazement.
Close your eyes.
Sometimes what you tell yourself
can only come by fasts and vigils
in the cold of three o’clock
is waiting at the doorway of a dream.
After all you are the center of a universe.
Once the first unquiet darkness
flickers into eyeless night,
the bodies eclipsed in the course of your orbit
will begin to give you back their shining halos.
Be afraid of the abyss that is yourself.
Whether you are still and silent
or scream the utter dregs of your unease,
it will dismast you with its stare.
This is the upshot of your artlessness,
the ecstasy that says so be it
and begins its steep descent
against the blackness that it trusts.
There hangs the shadowed planet it imagined,
an emptiness too great to be conceived.
Daniel Fitzpatrick loves Cetus, and likes walk around New Orleans. They think pierogi are delicious.