Finishing Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape marked the end of a series of Herculean labors that spanned about two years. On top of the normal duties associated with my work, we moved to a rural mountain top. My wife and I travelled cross-country to our new home just before winter of 2021, and upon arriving I was soon gripped by an impulse that drove me to an almost clichéd form of pinnacled introspection. However, it wasn’t until the tarot deck had been completed and the book had finally been written that my heart allowed itself a literary response to its new surroundings. These days, I don’t often feel the same poetic urge that was once coupled with a voracious desire for validation; when I do (or when I’ve tried), my attempts at verse have always tended toward the terse and provocative. Perhaps a sliver of that youthful intention survives in what follows. On the other hand, my homecoming to rural Pennsylvania seems to have evoked within me a rare equanimity and even rarer kind of, to risk a word, “clarity”—though I find it difficult to be disabused of the idea that we all live our lives underneath an incessant cascade of copious deliriums, including those occasional shimmering hails of arrows we might call “clarity”. In any case, I felt that my lingering mental snapshots of our woodland area and the attendant speed of these images were best captured in the form of haiku, given the rather straightforwardly seasonal character of these impressions. What you are about to read is a selection from a journal comprised of about 120 poems I’ve written since January of this year. I hope you enjoy them.
slick fawn spiriting to life on fresh laid blacktop clacks into the grass blood-hung rabbit wad in the fox's snouted grip just as the sun's up imagined peppers spring pokes its nose through frost how earth hardens! in the pretzeled black of a rat snake breeding ball smiles glide awry maggoted groundhog wormed swirl where its throat once was hair carried off ant-wise the bones in the weeds bake under a gush of sun where crows upright trout coast on cold gems blue hexagons, the sun bites down on the creek’s neck of jade through a gunsmoke brew a hen left clenched in the chops of a shot bobcat there are no bones here but a spiny mold bursts up where a bone might be the sun in a sack and another, we longed for yukon golds all year ice-shellacked ravine frantic critter nails skitter as it skids downslope bloody possum spine atop the unbroken snow floor absent: its paw prints nail-hung cart wheel sags while time heaves its weight upon wheel upon a wheel bizarre cabin creak night’s lungs engorged, blue oil surge dream sinews snap back fox sneezes wake us unaware they’ve been so close bedded in our dreams thunderous devil rush onyx-throated gusts choke the ridge hickory trunk cracks nothing leaves here untwisted, forever known all breaks, improvises a whirring darkness or an insect of some kind gropes upon silence it sharks wood, flies plunk rolling moon, loosened buckhaws these winds find a way! from northern fires a white flaked erasure swarms in our wooly lungs incredulous eyes forest smoke curls, dawn’s exhale we thought we could flee wasp, look here my friend we stole fire long ago so we nest in smoke an ax thrums at dawn the sun’s wand of ice prodding crow knotted branches impossible rocks our wolf-toothed spades crack and bounce as woolen clouds watch the forest floor: loose nails, old brick corners like noses "we were here," they said old iron elbow pounded earth a fortnight long hell shrugged, a well sprung scepter and snake for different reasons, none are fit to be held for long capitalism’s death: broken wand, spells run dry. now we’re lice in its wig all contains a message or so I thought. the moss wants an aeon of quiet