Why was delight not afraid?
It meant inattention
or it meant new attention:
a fish scale, scintillant,
limning deep deaths
of color that formed an abyss…
A fish scale!
—Junk lit
in ambiguous channels
like symbolic gold leaf.
It meant a wrought
and petalled land,
the sky’s blue smoke
over fields of asters,
years turning their soil
into semaphores,
stamens, fibrils
more intricate as you lower
your face to their details
which nearly speak.
Delight had an afterward
unseen, a figure
left behind, a trick of furtherance:
it was partial
and whole-blind.
It carried a little cavity
like belief
which meandering could fill.